Dec 30, 2009

The Snows of Kilimanjaro | Author Biography

Ernest Hemingway, as a result of his short stories, novels, and nonfiction, has become perhaps the best-known American writer of the twentieth century. In such novels as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway chronicled the lives of aimless, adventuring young adults in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. In other writings, Hemingway wrote elegantly and perceptively about some of his passions: bullfighting, hunting, fishing, drinking. But it is in his short stories where Hemingway best shows his mastery of style and structure and where his deepest and most enduring themes—death, writing, machismo, bravery, and the alienation of men in the modern world—dominate.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was born, in 1899, into perhaps the most characteristically American of environments: the suburbs. His mother was domineering, and dressed young Ernest in girls’ clothes when he was young (a fact that many of Hemingway’s biographers and critics have noted as an explanation for his relentless machismo). He graduated from Oak Park (Illinois) High School in 1917 and immediately went to work for a Kansas City newspaper. In 1918 he enlisted in the Red Cross and drove ambulances on the Italian front in World War I until he was seriously wounded—an episode that forms the basis for his famous novel A Farewell To Arms (1929).

The period between the World Wars brought Hemingway fame, fortune, and great artistic success. In 1920, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he lived for much of the following decade. Hemingway became a defining figure of the famous “Lost Generation” of Americans in Paris in the 1920s, and wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a portrait of the lives of his rootless, thrill-seeking friends who wandered from Paris to the south of France to Spain and back. During the 1930s, Hemingway wandered the world himself, spending time hunting and fishing in such locales as Kenya, Key West, Montana, and Spain. In the late 1930s Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist; from this experience arose his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. In 1939, now an international celebrity, he moved to Cuba, but with the outbreak of war in 1939, his taste for adventuring returned and he came to Europe in 1942 to fly with the RAF and participate in the Normandy invasion in 1944.

The years after World War II when Hemingway entered middle age, grew increasingly difficult for him. He continued to write, but only one of his books, The Old Man and the Sea, received much critical acclaim. He survived two airplane crashes, from which he never entirely healed, and his death was reported in the press at one point in 1954. That same year, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was declining and depressed. In 1961, he committed suicide in his cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, leaving behind four ex-wives, a number of children, and many thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts.