From 1925 to 1929, Ernest Hemingway produced some of the most
                 important works of 20th century fiction, including the landmark
                 short story collection IN OUR TIME (1925) which contained "The
                 Big Two-Hearted River." In 1926 he came out with his first true
                 novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES (after publishing TORRENTS OF
                 SPRING, a comic novel parodying Sherwood Anderson in 1925). He
                 followed that book with MEN WITHOUT WOMEN in 1927; it was
                 another book of stories which collected "The Killers" and "In
                 Another Country." In 1929 he published A FAREWELL TO ARMS,
                 arguably the finest novel to emerge from World War I.  

                 THE TORRENTS OF SPRING, a short comic novel, satirized
                 Hemingway’s early mentor Sherwood Anderson and allowed him to
                 break his relationship with Boni & Liveright to move to Scribner’s.  
 

                 In 1932, Hemingway published his book on Spanish bullfighting,
                 DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON. He completed FOR WHOM THE BELL
                 TOLLS in 1940, to great critical and commercial success. It was
                 followed by Hemingway's masterpiece THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA,
                 which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953.  In 1954,
                 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature. Hemingway
                 committed suicide on July 2, 1961. 

                 -- Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park,
                 Illinois. 

                 -- The second of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway's six
                 children, he had four sisters and one brother. 

                 -- Hemingway attended Oak Park public schools. 

                 -- After graduation from high school in the spring of 1917, he took
                 a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. 

                 -- He tried to enlist in the army at 18 but was deferred because
                 of poor vision. 

                 -- Hemingway volunteered as ambulance driver and sailed for
                 Europe in May 1918. 
                   
                 -- He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valor. 

                 -- In September 1921, he married Hadley Richardson. 

                 -- As a reporter in Europe, he forged friendships with Ezra Pound,
                 Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Max Eastman, Lincoln
                 Steffens and Wyndahm Lewis; was acquainted with the painters
                 Miro and Picasso. 

                 -- He worked for Ford Maddox Ford editing the Transatlantic
                 Review. 

                 -- After divorcing his first wife Hadley in 1927, later that year
                 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, an occasional fashion reporter
                 for the likes of Vanity Fair and Vogue. 

                 -- Hemingway had three sons, one by Hadley, two by Pfeiffer. 

                 -- He traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War. 

                 -- He divorced Pfeiffer and married Martha Gellhorn in 1943. 

                 -- Hemingway divorced his third wife Martha to marry his fourth,
                 Mary Welsh. 

                 -- In 1953, he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

                 -- In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 

                 -- Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961. 

                 ARTICLE

                 A few nights ago in a hotel room in Las Vegas on a bed strewn
                 with Hemingway books, I lay in the dark clutching a telephone.   

                 As I argued the pros and cons of Ernest Hemingway with my
                 fiance, my coworkers were out drinking and gambling and eating
                 and generally carousing...in short, behaving in a very
                 Hemingwayesque manner. I instead took the high road. Yet as I
                 read and thought and wrote and discussed, the irony of it struck
                 me. 

                 Hemingway was at home in both of these worlds.   

                 It was never an either/or proposition for this icon of American
                 literature. Ernest Hemingway was a man's man, full of himself,
                 hearty and arrogant and exuberant in his likes and dislikes. He
                 exhibited bravery in war and came home wounded. He survived
                 one small-plane crash only to get back on the flying horse and do
                 it again. He put much store in the value of courage and took on
                 testosterone-laden activities with zest: big-game hunting and
                 big-game fishing and  
                 big-time womanizing. He loved boxing and drinking and bullfighting.
 

                 Despite these macho tendencies, Hemingway had what some
                 people would consider a sissy job: writing. 

                 A prodigious reader and a diligent writer, Ernest Hemingway would
                 have felt comfortable eschewing one night of carousing to lock
                 himself away to pore over words and sculpt sentences, and he
                 was always ready to discuss the art of writing and the craft of
                 rewriting. In the midst of blood and gore and violence, he saw
                 things other writers never appeared to see: beauty in the
                 precision of the hunt; art in the movement of the matador; ballet
                 in the flash of the fish. 

                 This overtly masculine man was in touch with his feminine side. 

                 Even though the universal appeal of this Nobel-prize winning
                 author cannot be denied, on the surface Hemingway is a writer
                 who appeals predominantly to one gender, a proposition to which I
                 do not generally subscribe with regard to good literature. 

                 Hemingway's themes of war and outdoor sports such as hunting
                 and indoor sports such as drinking seem to appeal to men more
                 than women. In the years Hemingway wrote, and even today, a
                 boy coming of age is met on all sides with issues of courage,
                 whether it's the courage to stand up for himself and his beliefs or
                 the physical courage required to push himself to the limits of pain
                 and endurance in competition. Growing up female, however,
                 requires a different kind of courage, one that Hemingway never
                 really explored. 

                 So when I told the man in my life that from what I remembered of
                 Hemingway's books all those years ago in college, Hemingway was
                 overrated and never spoke to me or to any woman truly, I was
                 treated to an impassioned speech on Hemingway and his ability to
                 illuminate the passages through which a boy must pass to become
                 a man. I listened. Then I decided to take another look at Ernest
                 Hemingway. 

                 It was a reader's revelation of sorts.  

                 While it's unlikely I will ever change my mind about the man  
                 himself --- a man who drank too much, cheated on all his four
                 wives, and bragged and lied about his personal exploits --- I've
                 come to a new appreciation of Ernest Hemingway the writer.
                 Excessive in his personal life, Hemingway was the master of
                 defoliated language. What once seemed stylistically boring to me
                 now stands out as hard-fought and striking in its simplicity. The
                 masculine themes that strayed so far from my own callow
                 experiences now touch a chord of recognition. 

                 Reading A MOVEABLE FEAST was a new treat. Discovering the
                 brilliance of his short stories was an unexpected joy. Rereading
                 THE SUN ALSO RISES was proof there are reasons some books are
                 considered classics. 

                 Only a relatively few writers leave an indelible mark on literature,
                 but Ernest Hemingway is one of those few. He cleared the way for
                 so many contemporary writers it's easy to forget that the
                 combination of his style and subject matter was brazenly unique a
                 generation ago. He captured emotional intensity as clearly as he
                 painted a sense of place and his observations of human nature
                 were as keen as his hunter's eye. 

                 He may have been a bully and even a misogynist. He may have
                 been unforgiving of his friends, his wives, his critics, other writers
                 and ultimately himself. He may have been part phony and part
                 genius. Yet, as Gertrude Stein so succinctly declares in THE
                 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS... 

                 "...I have a weakness for Hemingway."  
 

                 --- Jami Edwards 

                 (c) Copyright 2005, Teenreads.com.