English Literature · 2 books
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, and died on July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was sixty-one years old. He had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, was the most famous American writer of his generation, and had spent his last years in serious physical and mental decline that made the clarity of his best work, and the distance from it, almost unbearable to contemplate. His death was ruled a suicide, though his family initially described it as an accident; the truth has not been seriously disputed since.
His father was a physician and an outdoorsman who took him hunting and fishing in the forests and lakes of northern Michigan from early childhood, and who later, in 1928, also died by suicide. His mother was a trained musician who was artistically ambitious and whose relationship with her son was complicated in ways that both of them recorded extensively and that he recorded, with considerable hostility, in his fiction. Oak Park was a prosperous, conservative community, and Hemingway spent his adult life systematically creating distance from everything it represented.
He did not go to university. After high school he worked briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, and then in 1918 went to Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He was severely wounded in July 1918 near Fossalta di Piave, when an Austrian mortar shell killed men around him and he carried a wounded soldier to safety despite having been hit by fragments himself. He received the Italian Silver Medal of Valor. He was eighteen years old. The wound, the experience of violence at close range, and the subsequent recovery in a Milan hospital became the material for A Farewell to Arms; more diffusely, the experience of having been seriously injured and having continued shaped everything he wrote about courage, endurance, and what he called grace under pressure.
He returned to America, worked for the Toronto Star, married Hadley Richardson in 1921, and moved to Paris, where he joined the community of expatriate American and British writers gathered there in the early 1920s. He became acquainted with Gertrude Stein — who would later describe his generation as a lost generation, a phrase he would use as an epigraph — and with Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. Paris gave him his literary formation in a direct sense: his exposure to Cézanne’s painting, to Stein’s ideas about prose rhythm and repetition, and to the modernist conversation about what writing should do was concentrated and intense during these years.
In Our Time, his first American collection of stories, was published in 1925. The Sun Also Rises followed in 1926, and A Farewell to Arms in 1929. These three books established his reputation and, more significantly, his style — the short declarative sentences, the visible preference for action over explanation, the consistent subordination of abstract statement to concrete observed detail, the characters who say less than they feel, the violence that is present in the prose even when it is not described. The style was a set of solutions to problems he had identified and worked through, not a pose; it came from a theory of what prose could and should do, which he articulated, in compressed form, as the iceberg theory: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
The later novels — Death in the Afternoon, 1932, a nonfiction study of bullfighting; Green Hills of Africa, 1935; To Have and Have Not, 1937; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940, his Spanish Civil War novel; Across the River and into the Trees, 1950 — received increasingly uneven responses. For Whom the Bell Tolls was both a commercial success and a major critical discussion. Across the River and into the Trees was widely considered a failure. The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, was a return to shorter, more concentrated form and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; it was cited the following year when he received the Nobel Prize.
He married four times: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh. He lived in Paris, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist and the Second World War. He was involved in two successive plane crashes in Africa in 1954 that left him with serious injuries — a fractured skull and vertebrae, among others — from which he never fully recovered.
The physical deterioration of his last years was severe, and his mental state became increasingly difficult. He was treated with electroconvulsive therapy, which he believed had destroyed his memory and therefore his capacity to write. His death in July 1961 ended a career that at its peak had demonstrated what a completely disciplined, fully realized prose style could do, and that in its final phase showed what happened when the instrument failed the craftsman.
His impact on American prose style was so immediate and so pervasive that within a decade of his early publications it was difficult to write clear, declarative English fiction without being measured against his example. Writers imitated the surface — short sentences, avoided abstractions — and missed the content, which was a theory about what fiction should be responsible for showing and what it should be disciplined enough to withhold. The iceberg principle is not a formula; it is a commitment. What is omitted must actually be there, fully known by the writer, for the omission to produce pressure rather than vacancy. The writers who understood this became better writers. The ones who imitated only the surface produced a kind of studied blankness that Hemingway himself would have found contemptible.
At Classics Retold, we have published new editions of Hemingway’s major works — the novels and story collections that established his reputation and that continue to demonstrate why the style he developed was not merely a fashion but a method. These editions are designed for readers approaching his work fresh and for those returning to it with new questions.
