Ernest Hemingway : Life, Books and Work
Ernest Hemingway was an American journalist, novelist and sportsman born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899. Hemingway lived an exciting life full of adventures. As a young man, he joined up the US army, as an ambulance assistant in 1917, despite being rejected as a gunman because of his defective eye. He came back from the war wounded physically and rejected by the nurse he fell in love with. He then discovered his passion for writing and traveled to France. He was heavily influenced by his contemporaries and superiors who then lived there in Paris: writers like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Because of their influence he wrote and published his first non-journalist writing in the form of a collection of short stories called In Our Time in the year 1925. The journey began with this book took many turns as he went on writing. But the end was not a good one. Ernest Hemingway, suffering from depression, shot himself. Here’s a short review of his finest works.
1. The Sun Also Rises
This is the pivotal book among all the works of Hemingway, a story of two young characters, Jake Barns and Lady Brett Ashley. It is the roaring twenties (not the one we’re living through; these are in no way roaring), the period after the Great War. American markets are at their all-time highs, young people spend money like water, and the times are great. But with all this comes a complete loss of moral compass with decadence at its worst. Hemingway calls this generation a lost generation and the story he tells shows why does he calls it so.
2. A Farewell to Arms
Hemingway said in an interview that he wrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get it right. A semi-autobiographical work that tells the story of an ambulance assistant that goes to war and falls for an English nurse amidst the gruelling horrors of the war-torn Europe. A timeless work filled with adventure.
3. For Whom The Bell Tolls
Hemingway overdoes himself with his writing style and subject matter of For Whom the Bell Tolls telling a story of a young American caught in the anti-fascists guerrilla unit in Spain. The determination of this young man is unbreakable. Hemingway wrote this book when he travelled to Spain to cover the news for civil war in 1937. Took him almost three years to finish this piece of work and he surpasses the qualities of A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises.
4. The Old Man and the Sea
The short story of an old fisherman Santiago who lives on the shores of Cuba that won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for literature in the year 1954 ‘for his mastery of the art of narrative storytelling’ that he wrote when he was in Cuba. This is a timeless classic that with times grows from the stillness of the sand on a calm shore to the volatility of wave of an enraged sea. It captures perfectly the struggle of a man once the epitome of seamanship, now old and weak, who lets go of everything to be at peace with himself.
- Mukul Joshi
