Ernest Hemingway: Life Research Ernest

Ernest Hemingway: Life Research Ernest Hemingway is an author that successfully pinpointed the difficulty of the human experience. Hemingway was from a generation that has been described as lost - a theme that often reverberates in his works. Themes of alienation arise in his stories while touching on the delicate nature of man. Love, and especially, war, is issues that bring a personal point-of-view to his works.

Robert Spiller claims that there is no other writer has provided readers with "so many a vivid and almost unbearable impressions of the human temperament under the pressures of war" (Spiller 1300). He was not happy with his country and the war, stating, "We had made a bloody mess of stand I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back" (Hemingway qtd. In Spiller 1300-1).

This view is one that shaped one of the most talented writers in American literature. War, love, and despair become catalysts for Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was born one of six children in Chicago on July 21, 1899. Susan Beegel maintains that his childhood and "young manhood provided subject matter for much of his best fiction and permanently molded his personality" (Beegel). As a young man, he lived in a "female-dominated household" (Beegel) where both of his parents were talented.

Hemingway inherited his mother's "charismatic stage presence and love of the arts, a love she cultivated in her children by filling their home with music, books, and magazines" (Beegel). This environment of tension became the fertile soil from which Hemingway, the writer, would emerge. Aldridge maintains that Hemingway's most "seductive attribute" is "his powerful responsiveness to experience" (Aldridge 139). The Sun Also Rises echoes Hemingway's reactions to his experiences.

He was living in the "most exotic city in Europe among some of the most remarkable personalities and gifted artists of the post Word War I era" (139). We see this in the novel with a myriad of hotels, bars, and restaurants. Hemingway had a "wonderful eye" (139) for the external elements and how he described them is what makes him unique. However, it was his ability to identify with every man that made him popular.

Hemingway was the kind of writer that is a "hero who distrusts heroism; he is the prophet of those who are without faith" (Fadiman 66). Those who felt lost and alienated found their hero in Hemingway. When he was young, Hemingway worked as a nurse for the American Red Cross after World War I began. Abroad, he witnessed the truth about war after being shot.

He was hospitalized in Milan, and fell in love with and was rejected by Agnes von Kurowsky - an affair that affected his life in a great and painful way. Beegel contends, "In pain, in love, and confined for months to a hospital bed, Hemingway seems to have made up his mind to become a writer" (Beegel). Writing became a form of therapy for him. After the war, Hemingway found it difficult to establish himself. While his parents wanted him to get a job, he wrote.

Hemingway discovered his style, which would eventually be known as his trademark. He used all of his personal experiences as inspiration for novels and stories. Margaret O'Connor claims that the war becomes a: Metaphor that tied his work to the international experience of his generation -- wounded, disillusioned youth seeking the healing powers of medicine, of religion, of love. Hemingway's veterans find no cures however, only temporary anodynes" (O'Connor 1388). From this perspective, we can see portions of real life merging with fiction.

Maxwell Geismann maintains that Hemingway is "essentially a poet, and a high romantic individualist, alienated from the world, and charting a dangerous course between glamour and despair" (Geismann 69). Love and life cannot help but intersect on the highway of life. Hemingway married for the first time in 1921 and he and his wife moved to Paris where Hemingway could pursue a literary education. Many believe thee were Hemingway's most productive years. This environment influenced his material. Heinrich Straumann observes that Hemingway's work "helped toward a new interpretation of America..

through the more concealed method of setting an American character.. against a foreign background" (Straumann). In 1926, Hemingway and his wife separated and his life went in a new direction. The Sun Also Rises was published and a Farewell to Arms was published three years later. Clearly, love was the writer's muse. Other successful novels are for Whom the Bell Tolls and the Old Man and the Sea. In 1953, he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for the Old Man and the Sea and, in 1954, the Nobel Prize for Literature.