Ernest Hemingway and His Works - Research Paper Example

Jerry Ciacho April 20, Ernest Hemingway and His Works Ernest Hemingway is considered as one of the most famous in all of history in the nineties and perhaps even until today. The Nobel Prize winning novelist had a lasting substantial impact on fiction in the nineties, and the majority of his literary works and productions are taken into account as part of classical literature at present. Ernest Hemingway gained eminent fame and popularity throughout his life. Undeniably, his life, works, impact and legacy continue to be distinguished and celebrated today. The influence of Ernest Hemingways books about American literature was substantial and endures at present. Truly, the impact and effect of Hemingways writing style was so extensive that it can be seen in much contemporary fiction. During his time, Hemingway influenced writers inside his modernist literary circle. “Hard-boiled” crime and pulp fiction, genres that thrived and prospered from the 1920s until the fifties frequently are strongly indebted to Ernest Hemingway. Most of Ernest Hemingway’s works greatly relate to his life and experience. Ernest’s mother, Grace-Hall Hemingway was a regular performer in concerts within the village. As an adult, Ernest declared his hatred for his mother. She, when Ernest was younger, insisted that he should learn to play the cello. This turned into a cause of fighting in the house. However, he later confessed that the music trainings and lessons that he learned in his childhood because of his mother became very beneficial and advantageous to his writing, as is obvious in the “contrapuntal construction” of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ernest Hemingway spent his childhood in his family’s summer home named Windemere by the Walloon Lake in the state of Michigan. As a young little boy, he was taught by his father how to hunt, fish and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. His experience around nature during that time implanted in him a hunger and craving for adventure outdoors, living in remote and far-flung areas. His audacious personality and thrill-seeking life added a resonating genuineness to his books and short works, for example, bull fighting and hunting for game in Green Hills of Africa. During the time of Ernest’s high school graduation, World War I was fuming in Europe and Hemingway wanted to enlist in the army, but because of his poor eyesight, he was deferred. Also having been prohibited by his father to sign up for World War I, Ernest decided to apply for a job as a journalist. In the October of 1917, the Kansas City Star hired him. He had to leave his home to assume his job. His father even went along with him to the station and stood by the train up until his sons time for departure. Hemingway would always remember this moment of leaving. He later wrote about it in For Whom the Bell Tolls involving the many emotions he felt of melancholy, liberation and maturity. Hemingway still desired to participate in the war. Although he could not enlist for the war, by 1918, he immediately took the opportunity when the Red Cross was taking in volunteers to be ambulance drivers. The day he arrived in Milan, Italy, he was severely wounded and had to come back home. His experiences from the war shaped the background for his novel, A Farewell to Arms. While he was recovering from his wounds at that time of also wrote, “And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered. (19 Baker, Hemingway) Hemingways account of war in this novel is haunting. He recreates the terror and fear in the way he describes it. "There were troops on this road and motor trucks and mules with mountain guns and as we went down, keeping to one side, and across, under a hill beyond the river, the broken houses of the little town that was to be taken." (53 Hemingway) His pieces are best known for Hemingway’s use of an unembellished, minimalist fashion and its accessibility to its readers. This style was one he used in all of his works and was a result of his trainings and lessons as a reporter and a newspaper writer for The Star. He was coached by learning from a style guidebook. It affirmed that excellent writing required short concise sentences, strong dynamic English, and positive writing. In Yahoo! Voices, The Stars style manual instructed, "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. He learned that expert journalists wrote the way things are. They simply declared what was, instead of digressing about how things might happen if this or that was true. This style of writing continued on with him as he wrote all his famous works. While he was admitted in a hospital in Milan, Italy, he met and immediately fell in love with a nurse there named Agnes von Kurowsky. They spent quite some time together. However, in the end, she ultimately rejected him and reasoned that he was far too young and immature for her. After some time has passed, Hemingway received a letter from her after he came back to the United States, telling him that she has already found someone else. After a decade has gone by, he was still trying to suppress and overcome his feelings and memories during his love affair with Agnes. A devastated and broken-hearted Hemingway directed his dissatisfaction and downheartedness into his writing. He made a decision that time that writing would be the most essential and dependable component of his life. Lovers and friends may come and go, but his writing would always be here for him. He can always depend on his novels and his literary works. Hemingways personal involvements would be greatly used in his numerous works of fiction. He would try as much as possible to follow actual events that happened closely. If he were not able to do so, then he would make up and create whatever he needed to in order to work out his story. Although the relationship had ended, Hemingway’s unconsummated love relationship with Agnes that lasted only five months was to live within his soul for the rest of his lifetime. Hemingway, unable to bottle these feelings within, expressed these strong affections and emotions as he wrote a novel based on his experience and romance with her in A Farewell To Arms, his novel that was published in 1929 about a romantic affair between an injured soldier from the First World War and his nurse. This was, one of his many attempts to flush his body, mind and heart out of his first true genuine love. Writing about and reminiscing this love affair did not appear in only this one novel. In fact, later on in his life, Hemingway wrote Three Stories and Ten Poems. Among the stories again recapitulated his love affair with Agnes in Milan, bringing it to a close with his personal account of his return to the United Sates and receiving her letter of rejection for him. It was, as Hemingway himself said, his own way of trying to liberate himself from the feelings of bitterness that remained with him. Meeting Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in a friend’s residence appeared to put a spring back up into his stride. Though eight years older than Hemingway, they married on the 3rd of September in 1920 at the country church at Horton Bay, Michigan. Hadley then was pregnant. At one time, the couple went on a trip to Pamplona, a city in the northern part of Spain. They were on the sixth of July for the fiesta celebration. Both were very enthralled by the bullfights and the bulls running in the streets. This trip along with a couple more around Spain turned out to be the basis of his novel, The Sun Also Rises, often times also called Fiesta. Unfortunately, a love affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue editor, ended his marriage with Hadley. All credits from this novel went to Hadley, whom it was written for. Hemingway, as he said, was distraught that he lost a woman he had and still loved. Subsequent to his divorce from his marriage with Hadley Richardson in 1927, Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer married. They, just like the previous marriage, divorced after he came back from the Spanish Civil War where he had become a journalist. This also happened after he had finished writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel written about this war. The way he described war was very unique in this novel saying, “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. Its been that way all this year. Its been that way so many times. All of war is that way.” (43 Hemingway) In his thirties, Hemingway spent much of his time engaging in hunting and other risky sports in different places such as in Africa, Florida, and Spain, which was his passion. Hemingway, an enthusiast for adventures, decided to take a hunting trip to Africa to shoot lions, even though at that time, he was suffering from numerous health problems. When he returned he started to write a book about his African safari called The Green Hills of Africa. After his marriage with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, Hemingway met a woman named Adriana Ivancich and he fell in love with her. This became the inspiration for another of Hemingway’s works entitled Across the River and Into the Trees. Hemingway, as obvious as it is through his life, did not fully know what he wanted in life. He hungered for both everything and nothing. His literary works and pieces was his own way of surviving the life he led. He wrote to escape his demons and to attain reputation and exaltation. He had always loved to write since he was young and throughout his life, he wrote so much brilliant fiction. As he said so himself about writing fiction, “You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.” (138 Knight) The legend of Hemingway and his fiction is great, and his style is exceedingly exceptional that it has left an everlasting legacy in literature and fiction that will last forever. Works Cited Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Schribner, 1940. Print. Baker, Carlos, and Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Schribner, 1981. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. 1st Schribner Classics Ed. New York: Schribner Classics, 1997. Print. Knight, Christopher J.. The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality. London: Associated University Press, 1952. Print. Ziegler, R.M.. "Life and Legacy of Ernest Hemingway." Yahoo! Voices. Yahoo! Inc., 2 July 2009. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Read More