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Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway

The author's life: * Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a physician, and his mother, was a musician. * Beginning his career as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway chose the newspaper instead of pursuing a college career, and although he only stayed with the Star for a mere six months, he used the newspaper’s style guide as a foundation for his writing. Later, The Star named Hemingway its top reporter for the last hundred years. * Unable to pass the physical examination due to poor vision, Hemingway could not join the United States Army as his father had hoped. Instead, he chose the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and served on the Italian front. One of his first short stories entitled, A Natural History of the Dead was written after witnessing the brutalities of war. After a war injury, a romantic relationship with one of his nurses spurred the writing of A Farewell to Arms and A Very Short Story. * After the war, Hemingway returned to newspaper work with the Toronto Star. In 1921, he married his first wife and they eventually moved to Paris and then to Canada. During this time period, Hemingway wrote some of his greats such as The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, and In Our Time. * In 1927 Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer. * The rest of his life contained triumphs such as For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, as well as extreme tragedies in his personal life. Later it was proven that Ernest Hemingway suffered from severe bouts of depression, alcoholism, and manic depressive episodes due to a hereditary disease known as bronze diabetes, in which excessive iron levels concentrate in the blood causing damage to the pancreas as well as instability in the cerebrum.

Main traits in his/her writing: * Hemingway referred to his style as the iceberg theory: in his writing the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out-of-sight. * "Theory of omission." Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing (such as Nick Adams fishing in "The Big Two-Hearted River") though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface (Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about anything else).

Famous stories/characters: * For Whom the Bell Tolls (novel, 1940) * The Old Man and the Sea (novel, 1951) * Nick Adams (character in a lot of novels, a representation of the author himself)

Miscellaneous things: * In 1996 Margaux Hemingway, Hemingway’s grandchild, committed suicide, being so “the fifth person in four generations of her family to commit suicide” (after himself, his father, and two of his sibyllines).

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