ERNEST HEMINGWAY

(1899-1961)

BACKGROUND

  • father = county treasurer (John, Sr.)
  • mother = former school teacher (Olive)
  • summers: manual laborer (on neighboring ranches)
  • high school:
    • school newspaper
    • president of graduating class
  • 1919-25: Stanford U….poor attendance, BUT no degree
  • 1925-30:
    • left college to be full-time writer in New York
    • (no luck, back to California)
    • drifted, read, wrote
  • worked as manual laborer
    • hod-carrier, fruit-picker, apprentice painter, laboratory assistant, caretaker, surveyor
  • 1st 3 books = basically ignored
  • 1930: married (Carol Henning, 1st wife)
    • #1: Carol Henning (divorced 1943)
    • #2: Gwyn Conger (1943-48)
    • #3: Elaine Scott (1950)

BACKGROUND

  • Tortilla Flat (1935)
    • marks a turn-around in his career
  • Of Mice And Men (1937)
    • 2 migrant workers
  • The Grapes Of Wrath (1939)
    • dispossessed Oklahoma family
    • (Pulitzer Prize)
  • World War II:
    • war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune
    • North Africa & Italy
  • post-WWII:
    • prosperity
    • materialism, acquisitiveness
    • suburbia
    • commercialization
  • 1962: Nobel Prize for Literature

 

THEMES

  • violence
  • despair
  • emotional unrest
  • disillusionment
  • world =
    • harsh, cruel, violent, meaningless
    • “devoid of traditional values and truths and instead marked by disillusionment and moribund idealism”
    • chaotic, confusing
    • used darkness to symbolize humanity's lot in life

THEMES

  • LOST GENERATION:
    • American expatriates who were morally and spiritually devastated by World War I
    • 1920s
    • Paris (literary capital of the 1920s)
    • Gertrude Stein
    • James Joyce, Ezra Pound
    • Ford Madox Ford, and F. Scott Fitzgerald
      • (see themes)

STYLE

  • short & simple syntax (economical prose style)
  • simple diction
    • journalistic, like a reporter
      • concision, compression, selectivity, precision, & immediacy
  • repetition
  • realism
    • simple style, concreteness, honesty, objectivity
    • (yet powerfulness)
  • the terse, almost journalistic prose, the compressed action, & the subdued yet suggestive symbolism
  • themes =
    • violence, despair, & emotional unrest; disillusionment; world = harsh, cruel, violent, meaningless, “devoid of traditional values and truths and instead marked by disillusionment and moribund idealism”; chaotic, confusing

 STYLE

  • short and simple sentence constructions,
    • with heavy use of parallelism,
      • --> which convey the effect of control, terseness, and blunt honesty;
  • purged diction
    • which above all eschews the use of bookish, Latinate, or abstract words
      • --> thus achieves the effect of being heard or spoken or transcribed from reality
      • --> rather than appearing as a construct of the imagination (in brief, verisimilitude)
  • skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint,
    • which operate either by pairing or juxtaposing opposites,
    • or else by running the same word or phrase through a series of shifting meanings and inflections.
      • (Sheldon Norman Grebstein)

LINKS LINKS