American writer Ernest Hemingway considered the master of the short story, tried to convey his impressions and experiences in a dry, short style. The subject of the author's works mainly consists of love, death, and human failure in life.
Like Redskin and Tough Boy in American literature, he successfully represented a whole concept of creativity by expressing it through portraits of athletes, hunters, and soldiers.
This vast imaginary universe, whose rules are meticulously defined, excludes neither the precision of realistic writing nor the large-scale symbolism that allows American literature to describe the human condition. The fact that Hemingway had a multidimensional field of interest and that he strictly adhered to it suggests that his works have a superficial nature, giving place to cheap heroism instead of a real psychological analysis.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works.
Hemingway, who was born in Oak Park near Chicago on July 21, 1899, as the son of a doctor father and an opera singer mother, grew up here with his five siblings and attended school until 1917.
An avid athlete, Hemingway was determined to become a journalist while still working at the student newspaper. He left his education, which he started at the Kansas City Star newspaper at the age of 18, to go to Italy as a medical officer with the Red Cross organization during World War I. Hemingway, who was seriously injured, voluntarily joined the infantry after recovering. When he was injured in the war, he became aware of the fear of death; This subject comes to the fore in all his works.
Hemingway went on a European journey with Hadley Richardson, whom he married in 1920, as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly newspaper. He divorced his first wife, with whom he had a child, in 1924. His second marriage was to journalist Pauline Pfeiffer (two children) and they divorced in 1940.
He was a war correspondent in the Greek-Turkish war in 1921. A year later, he described Mussolini's march on Rome. When he became friends with American writer Gertrude Stein, Hemingway became eager to turn to literature. The first fruit of this was a book of short stories called In Our Times (1924). Hemingway conveys his impressions here in simple, clear language. The purpose of his works was to reach the realities beneath the surface.
In 1926, Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published. The atmosphere of the so-called "Lost Generation" (desperate American writers in Paris in the 20s) is reflected in the story of an American who loses her ability to have children and her belief that life has meaning due to the wounds she received in the war.
His novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), perceived as an indictment against national fanaticism, was a huge success. In this novel, Hemingway describes the love of a wounded soldier for a nurse. Realizing the meaninglessness of war, the man also has to endure the death of his pregnant lover.
During a trip to Spain, he wrote the novel Death in the Afternoon (1931). Here, respect for bullfighting and the country of bullfighting, which became Hemingway's passion, is revealed.
He described his African tour in 1935 in The Green Hills of Africa (1935). A year later, he sided with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He also prepared the script for a documentary film about the war: The Spanish Earth (1938). Hemingway moved to Cuba in 1939. A year later he married journalist Martha Gallhorn (they divorced in 1944). He made his fourth marriage to Mary Welsh in 1946.
Also in 1940, his successful novel For Hom the Bell Tolls was published. In this novel, which was filmed in 1943, American college professor Robert Jordan blows up a strategically unimportant bridge with a guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. Jordan, who fell in love with Maria, with whom he fought, is attacked by the Francoist unit, is injured, and dies. In this work about love and death, the interests of the individual are no longer the focal point. Hemingway agrees to assume responsibility on behalf of society. He put this idea into practice in the American Navy, which he joined in 1942. As a correspondent for the invasion troops, he participated in the French invasion and liberation of Paris in 1944.
NOBEL PRIZE
After his novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), which was not a great success, Hemingway's masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952. The hero of this novella, Cuban fisherman Santiago, catches a huge swordfish after sailing in vain 84 times. In the joy of this success, he ties the fish he caught to his boat and sails towards his home. Although his fish was eaten by sharks on the way, Santiago went to sea again the next day. This simple parabola about human life symbolizes man's futile pursuit of success. The need to kill dominates man's war against nature. Despite all defeats, the individual returns to the fight for life.
After receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway, a passionate hunter with arteriosclerosis, ended his life seven years later, on July 2, 1961, at the age of 61, by shooting himself with a hunting rifle in Ketchum, Idaho.