專八人文知識需知的美國名人--海明威
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in anewspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the FirstWorld War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army.
Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spentconsiderable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter forCanadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events asthe Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris,which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was AFarewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the warand his role as a deserter.
Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background forhis most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the mostoutstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman'sjourney, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Life
The son of a country doctor, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star aftergraduating from high school in 1917. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver inFrance and in the Italian infantry and was wounded just before his 19th birthday.
Later, while working in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, he became involved with theexpatriate literary and artistic circle surrounding Gertrude Stein. During the Spanish Civil War,Hemingway served as a correspondent on the loyalist side. He fought in World War II and thensettled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After hisexpulsion from Cuba by the Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. He was increasingly plagued by illhealth and mental problems, and in July, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself.
Works
Hemingway’s fiction usually focuses on people living essential, dangerous lives—soldiers, fishermen,athletes, bullfighters—who meet the pain and difficulty of their existence with stoic courage. Hiscelebrated literary style, influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, is direct, terse, and oftenmonotonous, yet particularly suited to his elemental subject matter.
Hemingway’s first books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), In Our Time (short stories, 1924),and The Torrents of Spring (a novel, 1926), attracted attention primarily because of his literarystyle. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), he was recognized as the spokesman ofthe “lost generation” (so called by Gertrude Stein). The novel concerns a group of psychologicallybruised, disillusioned expatriates living in postwar Paris, who take psychic refuge in such immediatephysical activities as eating, drinking, traveling, brawling, and lovemaking.
His next important novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), tells of a tragic wartime love affair between anambulance driver and an English nurse. Hemingway also published such volumes of short stories asMen without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933), as well as The Fifth Column, a play.His First Forty-nine Stories (1938) includes such famous short stories as “The Killers,” “TheUndefeated,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway’s nonfiction works, Death in theAfternoon (1932), about bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), about big-game hunting,glorify virility, bravery, and the virtue of a primal challenge to life.
From his experience in the Spanish Civil War came Hemingway’s great novel, For Whom the BellTolls (1940), which, in detailing an incident in the war, argues for human brotherhood. His novellaThe Old Man and the Sea (1952) celebrates the indomitable courage of an aged Cuban fisherman.Among Hemingway’s other works are the novels To Have and Have Not (1937) and Across theRiver and into the Trees (1950); he also edited an anthology of stories, Men at War (1942).
Posthumous publications include A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of Paris in the 1920s; thenovels Islands in the Stream (1970) and True at First Light (1999), a safari saga begun in 1954 andedited by his son Patrick; and The Nick Adams Stories (1972), a collection that includes previouslyunpublished pieces.
His awards
During his lifetime, he was awarded with:
Silver Medal of Military Valorin World War IPulitzer Prize in 1953 (for TheOld Man and the Sea)NobelPrize in literature in 1954 (also partly for The OldMan and the Sea)
In 2001, two of his books, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, would be named to the listof the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the AmericanModern Library.
A simple version
The Hemingway code heroes and grace under pressure:
They have seen the cold world ,and for one cause, they boldly and courageously face the reality.They has an indestructible spirit for his optimistic view of life. Whatever is the result is, the are readyto live with grace under pressure. No matter how tragic the ending is, they will never be defeated.Finally, they will be prevail because of their indestructible spirit and courage.
2. The iceberg technique:
Hemingway believe that a good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character oraction. The one-eighth the is presented will suggest all other meaningful dimensions of the story.Thus, Hemingway’s language is symbolic and suggestive.
