Ernest[1]

American poet Gertrude Stein coined the expression "lost generation.“ This was the generation that had gone through World War I. They were "lost" in a topsy-turvy world, what the poet T. S. Eliot called a "waste land." The question for these men and women was, how does one live in a world without stability, without security? Hemingway's answer was the code hero. Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. The Sun Also Rises (1926) has been considered the essential prose of the Lost Generation.
The code by which Hemingway's heroes must live is contingent on the qualities of courage, self-control, endurance and "grace under pressure." The finest and best known of these code heroes appears, however, as old Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea.
The Hemingway Hero
Themes
A central theme in Hemingway's work is “grace under pressure” ---how the individual fits into society, and how one should live in what often seems to be a crazy and difficult world. This issue is explored in many of Hemingway's early short stories that focus on Nick Adams, Hemingway's young alter ego.
Omnipresent violence is a fact of existence, according to Hemingway. In much of Hemingway's fiction, as in the Killers, violence impinges on everyday existence and leaves everything altered.
Major Works
The Sun Also Rises(1926): It deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. In attempt to cope with their despair they turn to alcohol, violence, and sex. The text is multilayered and rich in allusions.
In his sixty-two years, he had lived in or traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Africa. He had witnessed or participated in World Wars I and II, the Spanish Civil War, the GrecoTurkish War, and the Sino-Japanese War.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
The central hero Lieutenant Henry ,after seeing so many wounds and deaths in the battlefield, feel sick of the war which was once declared to be glorious and sacred. The senselessness, ugliness, waste and brutality tend to be the essence of life.
CareerΒιβλιοθήκη In 1917, Hemingway worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. He then joined volunteer ambulance unit in Italy during World War I. He moved in 1921 to Paris. Here he associated with American expatriates Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. Stein, in paticular, influenced his style. In 1923 he published Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time in 1925. Hemingway's first serious novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES(1926) gained great success.
He was known worldwide as a big game hunter, a deep-sea fisherman, a bullfight enthusiast, and an all-around sportsman and athlete. He had been married four times and had fathered three sons.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
The thesis is that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. Robert Jordan comes to understand that all of us are "involved in mankind," and that "no man is an island."
Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in A Farewell to Arms (1929). Besides Men Without Women(1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933),he wrote only two during the next few years, Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfight and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big hunting. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. He was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Discouraged by a troubled family background ,illness and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961.
Some stories in Men Without Women treat the anguish of human sexual relations as in "Hills Like White Elephants" . Other stories explore the hollowness of religious consolation as in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and the meaninglessness of human life, male camaraderie, and the inevitability of death as in The Killers.
Irving Howe has described the typical Hemingway hero as a man "who is wounded but bears his wounds in silence, who is defeated but finds a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat." Death is not the ultimate fear: the Hemingway hero knows how to confront death. What he truly fears is nada (the Spanish word for nothing)-existence in a state of nonbeing.