Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Marvel

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . . The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . . The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits . . . .All the rivers run into the sea; ye the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." (Ecclesiastes 1:4-7)

Ernest Hemingway's style of writing is a unique form. In almost all of his novels the protagonist is a war veteran, which he himself was. He was known to travel the world. These places sparked the imagination to create novels that led to a Nobel Prize for literature. To better understand the impact of Ernest Hemingway as an American author, one must have a description of his background, a critical analysis of his work The Sun Also Rises, and his impact and importance upon the literary world.

Ernest Hemingway was known as a simple, creative writer and person. Leonard Unger wrote, "He had an extraordinary reputation as a colorful human being." He was born July 2, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father Dr. Clarence "Ed" Hemingway was a physician, and his mother, Grace, taught piano and voice lessons. He spent summers in upper Michigan, where he found a passion for hunting and fishing. After graduating from Oak Park High, his writing career began. He learned how to get the reader's heart writing for The Kansas City Star. He wanted to enlist in the army for WWI, but his eyesight was not good enough, so he drove a Red Cross ambulance in Italy. On July 8, 1918 he was severely wounded, and was hospitalized for many months. He married his first wife, Hadley Richardson, who was eight years older, and had a son named John, a.k.a. "Bumby". They divorced in 1926, the year The Sun Also Rises was published, and married the rich Pauline Pfieffer in 1927. They had two sons, Patrick and Gregory, and bought a house in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Pfieffer divorced in 1940, and Hemingway fell in love married again in 1940 to Martha Ellis Gellhorn. Martha was also an effective journalist and write about the conflicts of the Spanish-American War, World War II, Vietnam, and other issues in the middle East. The marriage ended when she left him five years later; she was the only one of his four wives to leave him. Ernest married again to Mary Welsh, a stunning blond journalist from Minnesota, in 1946. In 1953-54, He and his wife Mary survived two plane crashes, which left him with a fractured skull, dislocated shoulder, and injured spine; this time it really hindered his ability to write. He received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Due to all of Hemingway's sicknesses, depression, and many injuries, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961.

"The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first serious venture into the craft of the novel, and in some ways the 1926 novel may be his best"(Lewis