Grace Under Pressure Ernest Hemingway Hemingway was born

“Grace Under Pressure” Ernest Hemingway

�Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois �“A place of wide lawns and narrow minds”

�He spent his summers on a lake in upper Michigan

�When he was 25 years old, he went to World War One in Italy and served in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps �One night in July 1918 he was hit by a trench mortar shell. � 228 pieces of shrapnel hit his body.

�He recuperated in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse. She was the inspiration for Catherine Barkley

�Unhappy back home, he went to Paris where he worked as a reporter and freelance writer. �Here he honed his literary skills and was part of a group of artists called “The Lost Generation”

�His terse, straightforward style influenced every succeeding generation of writers. �He called this writing on the “principle of the iceberg”

�“For every one-eighth of it that you see above water, there is seven-eighths of it submerged. ”

�He became famous overnight with the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), about the lost generation. �He followed that up with A Farewell to Arms (1929), also a bestseller.

� By 1930 his public image was world famous. � He became fascinated by bullfighting in Spain and published a nonfiction book about it, Death in the Afternoon. � He also became interested in biggame hunting, and went on safaris in Africa. � He wrote a book about that too, called Green Hills of Africa. � Ironically, he was sick much of his life had bad eyesight, and was accident-prone

�In the 1940 s he was in two separate plane crashes in Africa. In the second one, newspaper headlines reported he had died.

�After writing nonfiction in the 1930 s, he returned to fiction with For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. �Hemingway sympathized with, and fought with, the left-leaning Republicans against the fascist regime. �Citadel graduate Jim Rigney (aka “Robert Jordan”) took his pen name from this character. �He called Spain “the country I love the most” and returned there frequently

�He was larger than life, and hard to live with. �He was married 4 times, and each time he valued work more than family. �He would tolerate no wife who tried to overshadow him. �He had 3 sons, one of whom is still living.

�He wrote his most famous books in Key West and Cuba. �Both houses there are now museums. �He loved being on the water and sport fishing. He competed in fishing and boxing tournaments.

�During World War II, he reported on the Normandy invasion from inside the amphibious landing craft. �He marched into Paris on the day it was liberated, and “took command” of the bar at the Ritz Hotel

�In Cuba he had a yacht, the Pilar, captained by a fisherman named Gregorio Fuentes. �In the 1950 s, critics thought Hemingway was finished, but Fuentes inspired him to write The Old Man and the Sea. �When it first appeared in Life magazine, the story sold out the entire issue.

�Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. �Throughout his life had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar syndrome. �This was probably brought on by trauma from his war wound. �He grew depressed, and had to undergo electroshock therapy.

�Instead of helping him, this made his condition even worse. �Clinically depressed, he committed suicide in 1961. �After he died, five more books he had completed but not published, were brought out.

�He created a new style of writing that predominates today. �He regarded writing as a noble calling, almost religious in nature. �He was dedicated to his craft, and he worked hard at it. �He hated phonies, always lived among “ordinary” people, and thought the literary world was stuffy and artificial.

�He created a new kind of hero, who lives by a code. �He thought the greatest virtue in one’s life was living with “grace under pressure. ” �That philosophy defines Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms.