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...
He is the alienated man's hero. John Atkins asserts that Hemingway is the "literary personification of the Natural Man" (Atkins 68). This natural man experiences the grit of love, war and despair and lives to tell about it. Hemingway's life proves that talent is not without suffering. This suffering was what made the writer, however, and we could not have one without the other. Hemingway probed the tough issues of humanity and earned the respect of millions through his words.
Works Cited
Aldrige, John. "The Sun Also Rises: Sixty Years Later." Readings on Earnest Hemingway. San Diego: Greenhaven Press. 1997.
Atkins, John. "Ernest Hemingway." Modern American Literature.
Beegel, Susan. "Ernest Hemingway." GALE Resource Database. Site Accessed October 8, 2008. http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com
Fadiman, Clifton. "Ernest Hemingway." Modern American Literature.
Geismar, Maxwell. "Ernest Hemingway." Modern American Literature.
O'Connor, Margaret. Ernest Hemingway. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. II. Lexington D.C. Heath and Company. 1990.
Shaw, Samuel. "Hemingway, Nihilism, and the American Dream." Readings on Earnest Hemingway. San Diego: Greenhaven Press. 1997.
Spiller, Robert, et al. Literary History of the United States. Macmillan Publishing Company. 1946.
Straumann, Heinrich.
Young, Philip. "A Master Key to Understanding Hemingway." Readings on Earnest Hemingway. San Diego: Greenhaven Press. 1997.
