Ernest Hemingway
| Ernest Hemingway | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| File:480px-ErnestHemingway2.png | |||
| Born | 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, U.S. | ||
| Died | 2 July 1961 (aged 61) in Ketchum, Idaho, U.S. | ||
| Nationality | American | ||
| Occupation | Author, journalist | ||
| Religion | Roman Catholic | ||
| Spouse | Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1921–1927; divorced) Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1940; divorced) Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945; divorced) Mary Welsh Hemingway (1946–1961; widow) | ||
| Children | Jack Hemingway (1923–2000) Patrick Hemingway (1928–) Gregory Hemingway (1931–2001) | ||
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) | ||
Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 – 2 July 1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer, who had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. He is also known for his adventurous and widely publicized life. He was an anti-fascist who famously wrote on the Spanish Civil War. Possibly because of this, leftist Wikipedia downplays or ignores many criticisms, such as accusations of being a Soviet agent and of boasting of murdering many German prisoners of war during WWII while being a war correspondent, which were war crimes. Even recent accusations of anti-Semitism and "toxic masculinity" are mostly ignored. See the "External links" section.
Life
His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and his public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the "Lost Generation". His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926.
After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they split when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. During the war he was present at the Invasion of Normandy and the liberal occupation of Paris.
He was a notorious and pathologic German hater and mass murderer of Germans. Hemingway's own assertion is that he did kill on several occasions during his approximately eight months in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in 1944 and early 1945. According to Hemingway himself, he killed 122 prisoners of war.
Hemingway reportedly killed Germans in the French town of Villedieu-les-Poeles. The occupiers had just been driven out except for a cellar full of wounded men of the Waffen SS who had been bypassed by advancing American infantry. Under the international laws of war, wounded were under the same special protection as POWs. Townspeople directed Hemingway and his Army driver, Archie Pelkey, to the cellar. According to Pelkey, when nobody answered Hemingway's yells for anyone below to come out with their hands raised, the correspondent said, "All right. Divide these equally among yourselves" and tossed three grenades down into the cellar.
Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba under Batista during the 1930s and '40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho. Hypocritical as he was, he left the country when the communists, whom he so admired, conquered Cuba (Castro's 1959 Putsch) and thee bloody rule of the Communist Regime under Fidel Castro spread like wildfire.
Death
Hemingway committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
External links
- On Hemingway, jews, and Masculinity
- The Real Ernest Hemingway
- The Real Ernest Hemingway?
- Ernest Hemingway: War Correspondent 1944–1945: Part 1
- Hemingway and Pound: Literary Friends, Wartime (Criminal?) Opposites