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• Born: 21 July 1899
• Birthplace: Oak Park, Illinois
• Died: 2 July 1961 (suicide)
• Best Known As: Famously manly author of For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels and short stories about outdoorsmen, expatriates, soldiers and other men of action, and his plainspoken no-frills writing style became so famous that it was (and still is) frequently parodied. His dashing machismo was almost as famous as his writing: he lived in Paris, Cuba and Key West, fancied bullfighting and big game hunting, and served as a war correspondent in WWII and the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway sealed his own notoriety when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. His books include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His memoir of his early life in Paris, A Moveable Feast, was published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway is also called by his familiar nickname "Papa"... His birthdate is sometimes listed in error as 1898. According to a 1954 article in the New York Times, "In most reference books and in his own conversation he is one year older because he gave 1898 as his birth date when he tried to enlist [in the army] early in 1917, and stuck to that date ever since"... Hemingway's father also committed suicide, shooting himself with a Civil War pistol in 1928... He wrote several short stories about the character Nick Adams, his youthful alter ego; they were collected in The Nick Adams Stories in 1972.

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Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961), American big-game hunter, deep-sea fisherman, war correspondent, and winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. Still a teenager, Hemingway volunteered for war work and was wounded on the Italian front in 1918, the basis for his first major book A Farewell to Arms (1929). His fascination with ‘grace under pressure’ was explored in his treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932), and he returned to Spain in 1937 to cover the Spanish civil war, arriving in time for the end of the battle of Brihuega, part of the battle of Guadalajara, in which the Italians were stopped in a battle involving about 70 tanks. As war correspondents sometimes do, he overestimated its significance, reporting that ‘Brihuega will take its place in military history with all the other decisive battles of the world’; but that was the way it was in Spain, sometimes, and he distilled the experience in his greatest novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). In WW II he was a thrusting war correspondent with US forces in Europe. After the war he summarized his philosophy with marvellous economy in The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Repeated accidents and alcoholism sapped his vitality and he shot himself in 1961.

— Christopher Bellamy

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1898-1961), American Nobel Prize-winning author, was one of the most celebrated and influential literary stylists of the 20th century.

Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his own life-time - in a sense, a legend of his own making. He worked hard at being a composite of all the manly attributes he gave to his fictional heroes - a hard drinker, big-game hunter, fearless soldier, amateur boxer, and bullfight aficionado. Because the man and his fiction often seemed indistinguishable, critics have had difficulty judging his work objectively. His protagonists - virile and laconic - have been extravagantly praised and vehemently denounced. In his obsession with violence and death, the Hemingway creation has been rivaled only by the Byronic myth of the 19th century. Despite sensational publicity and personal invective, Hemingway now ranks among America's great writers. His critical stature rests solidly upon a small body of exceptional writing, distinguished for its stylistic purity, emotional veracity, moral integrity, and dramatic intensity of vision.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1898. His father was a country physician, who taught his son hunting and fishing; his mother was a religiously puritanical woman, active in church affairs, who led her boy to play the cello and sing in the choir. Hemingway's early years were spent largely in combating the repressive feminine influence of his mother and nurturing the masculine influence of his father. He spent the summers with his family in the woods of northern Michigan, where he often accompanied his father on professional calls. The discovery of his father's apparent cowardice, later depicted in the short story "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," and his suicide several years later left the boy with an emotional scar.

Despite the intense pleasure Hemingway derived from outdoor life, and his popularity in high school - where he distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete - he ran away from home twice. However, his first real chance for escape came in 1917, when the United States entered World War I. He volunteered for active service in the infantry but was rejected because of eye trouble.

After spending several months as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway enlisted in the Red Cross medical service, driving an ambulance on the Italian front. He was badly wounded in the knee at Fossalta di Piave; yet, still under heavy mortar fire, he carried a wounded man on his back a considerable distance to the aid station. After having over 200 shell fragments removed from his legs and body, Hemingway next enlisted in the Italian infantry, served on the Austrian front until the armistice, and was decorated for bravery by the Italian government.

Learning His Trade

Shortly after the war Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent in the Near East for the Toronto Star. When he returned to Michigan, he had already decided to commit himself to fiction writing. His excellent journalism and the publication in magazines of several experimental short stories had impressed the well-known author Sherwood Anderson, who, when Hemingway decided to return to Europe, gave him letters of introduction to expatriates Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Hemingway and his bride, Hadley Richardson, journeyed to Paris, where he served his literary apprenticeship under these two prominent authors. Despite the abject poverty in which he and his wife lived, these were the happiest years of Hemingway's life, as well as the most artistically fruitful.

In 1923 Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. The poems are insignificant, but the stories give strong indication of his emerging genius. "Out of Season" already contains the psychological tension and moral ambivalence characteristic of his mature work. With In Our Time (1925) Hemingway's years of apprenticeship ended. In this collection of stories, he drew on his experiences while summering in Michigan to depict the initiation into the world of pain and violence of young Nick Adams, a prototype for later Hemingway heroes. The atrocities he had witnessed as a journalist in the Near East became the brief vignettes about intense suffering that formed inter chapters for the collection. One story, "Indian Camp," which sets the tone for the entire volume, has Nick accompanying his father, Dr. Adams, on a call during which the physician performs a caesarean operation with no anesthetic. They discover afterward that the squaw's husband, unable to bear his wife's screams, has killed himself by nearly severing his head with a razor. The story is written in Hemingway's characteristically terse, economic prose. "The End of Something" and "The Three Day Blow" deal with Nick's disturbed reaction to the end of a love affair. "The Big Two hearted River" describes a young man just returned from war and his desperate attempt to prevent mental breakdown.

Major Novels

Hemingway returned to the United States in 1926 with the manuscripts of two novels and several short stories. The Torrents of Spring (1926), a parody of Sherwood Anderson, was written very quickly, largely for the purpose of breaking his contract with Boni and Liveright, who was also Anderson's publisher. That May, Scribner's issued Hemingway's second novel, The Sun Also Rises. This novel, the major statement of the "lost generation," describes a group of expatriate Americans and Englishmen, all of whom have suffered physically and emotionally during the war; their aimless existence vividly expresses the spiritual bankruptcy and moral atrophy of an entire generation. Hemingway's second volume of short stories, Men without Women (1927), contains "The Killers," about a man who refuses to run from gangsters determined to kill him; "The Light of the World," dealing with Nick Adams's premature introduction to the sickening world of prostitution and homosexuality; and "The Undefeated," concerning an aging bullfighter whose courage and dedication constitute a moral victory in the face of physical defeat and death.

In December 1929 A Farewell to Arms was published. This novel tells the story of a tragically terminated love affair between an American soldier and an English nurse, starkly silhouetted against the bleakness of war and a collapsing world order. It contains a philosophical expression of the Hemingway code of stoical endurance in a violent age: "The world breaks everyone," reflects the protagonist, "and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

Hemingway revealed his passionate interest in bull-fighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a humorous and inventive nonfiction study. In 1933 Scribner's published his final collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing. This volume, containing his most bitter and disillusioned writing, deals almost exclusively with emotional breakdown, impotence, and homosexuality.

Hemingway's African safari in 1934 provided the material for another nonfiction work, The Green Hills of Africa (1935), as well as two of his finest short stories, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Both stories concern attainment of self-realization and moral integrity through contact with fear and death.

Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not (1937) in response to the 1930s depression. The novel, inadequately conceived and poorly executed, deals with a Florida smuggler whose illegal activities and frequent brutalities mask his sense of ethics and strength of character. Mortally wounded by the gangsters with whom he has been dealing, the individualistic hero comes to the startling realization that "One man alone ain't got no - chance."

The chief political catalyst in Hemingway's life was the Spanish Civil War. In 1936 he had returned to Spain as a newspaper reporter and participated in raising funds for the Spanish Republic until the war's end in 1939. In 1937 he collaborated on the documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway's only writing during this period was a play, The Fifth Column (1936; produced in New York in 1940), a sincere but dramatically ineffective attempt to portray the conditions prevailing during the siege of Madrid.

Seventeen months after that war ended, Hemingway completed For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His most ambitious novel, it describes an American professor's involvement with a loyalist guerrilla band and his brief, idyllic love affair with a Spanish girl. A vivid, intelligently conceived narrative, it is written in less lyrical and more dramatic prose than his earlier work. Hemingway deliberately avoided having the book used as propaganda, despite its strained attempt at an affirmative resolution, by carefully balancing fascist atrocities with a heartless massacre by a peasant mob.

World War II

Following the critical and popular success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway lapsed into a literary silence that lasted a full decade and was largely the result of his strenuous, frequently reckless, activities during World War II. In 1942 as a Collier's correspondent with the 3d Army, he witnessed some of the bloodiest battles in Europe. Although he served in no official capacity, he commanded a personal battalion of over 200 troops and was granted the respect and privileges normally accorded a general. At this time he received the affectionate appellation of "Papa" from his admirers, both military and literary.

In 1944 while in London, Hemingway met and soon married Mary Welsh, a Time reporter. His three previous marriages - to Hadley Richardson, mother of one son; to Pauline Pfeiffer, mother of his second and third sons; and to Martha Gelhorn - had all ended in divorce. Following the war, Hemingway and his wife purchased a home, Finca Vigia, near Havana, Cuba. Hemingway's only literary work was some anecdotal articles for Esquire; the remainder of his time was spent fishing, hunting, battling critics, and providing copy for gossip columnists. In 1950 he ended his literary silence with Across the River and into the Trees, a narrative, flawed by maudlin self-pity, about a retired Army colonel dying of a heart condition in Venice and his dreamy love affair with a pubescent girl.

Last Works

Hemingway's remarkable gift for recovery once again asserted itself in 1952 with the appearance of a novella about an extraordinary battle between a tired old Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin. The Old Man and the Sea, immediately hailed a masterpiece, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Although lacking the emotional tensions of his longer works, this novella possesses a generosity of spirit and reverence for life which make it an appropriate conclusion for Hemingway's career. In 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hemingway's rapidly deteriorating physical condition and an increasingly severe psychological disturbance drastically curtailed his literary capabilities in the last years of his life. A nostalgic journey to Africa planned by the author and his wife in 1954 ended in their plane crash over the Belgian Congo. Hemingway suffered severe burns and internal injuries from which he never fully recovered. Additional strain occurred when the revolutionary Cuban government of Fidel Castro forced the Hemingways to leave Finca Vigía. After only a few months in their new home in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for hypertension and emotional depression and was later treated by electroshock therapy. Scornful of an illness which humiliated him physically and impaired his writing, he killed himself with a shotgun on July 2, 1961.

Shortly after Hemingway's death, literary critic Malcolm Cowley and scholar Carlos Baker were entrusted with the task of going through the writer's remaining manuscripts to decide what material might be publishable. The first posthumous work, A Moveable Feast (1964), is an elegiac reminiscence of Hemingway's early years in Paris, containing some fine writing as well as brilliant vignettes of his famous contemporaries. A year later the Atlantic Monthly published a few insignificant short stories and two long, rambling poems. In 1967 William White edited a collection of Hemingway's best journalism under the title By-Line Ernest Hemingway.

Further Reading

The authorized biography of Hemingway is Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). A controversial portrait is A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1966). Among the major full-length critical studies are Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1952; 3d rev. ed. 1963), a textual study with emphasis on structure and symbolism; Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (1952; rev. ed. 1966); Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (1963); Richard B. Hovey, Hemingway: The Inward Terrain (1968); and Leo Gurko's more general Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism (1968).

The most valuable early critical essays on Hemingway are Edmund Wilson, "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale," in Wound and the Bow (1941); Robert Penn Warren, "Ernest Hemingway," in Selected Essays (1958); and Malcolm Cowley, "Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," reprinted in Robert Percy Weeks, ed., Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962). The two major critical collections are John K. McCaffery, ed., Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Work (1950), and Carlos Baker, ed., Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (1961). See also the relevant sections in Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction, 1920-1940 (1941); Edwin Berry Burgum, The Novel and the World's Dilemma (1947); Wilbur M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in America, 1920-1950 (1950; 2d rev. ed. 1958); Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950 (1951); and Ray B. West, The Short Story in America, 1900-1950 (1952).

For more information on Ernest Miller Hemingway, visit Britannica.com.

(1899-1961), novelist and adventurer. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway influenced a generation of American writers and perhaps two generations of American men with his lean prose style and macho ethics. Revolting against an oppressively genteel mother and a stern doctor father, he declared himself a free soul, with allegiance to no country or creed except courage. After a brief stint on the Kansas City Star, he volunteered for the Red Cross ambulance corps in 1918. On the Italian front he was severely wounded after only a few weeks service. Upon recovering, he transferred his activities to Paris, where he reported for the Toronto Star and hobnobbed with writers such as Gertrude Stein. He began writing short stories set largely in northern Michigan where he had spent his boyhood summers.

His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), won him international acclaim. A plotless tale about disillusioned expatriates in Paris who escape their ennui with drinking, brawling, and lovemaking, it became the bible of those whom Gertrude Stein christened "the lost generation." Hemingway followed this book with a far stronger story, A Farewell to Arms (1929), based on his wartime experiences in Italy. He also began cultivating a public persona as a sportsman and adventurer that became almost as important as his literary career. He hunted in the American West and in Africa, fished the Gulf Stream off Cuba, and wrote an essay on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932). Although he had proclaimed himself apolitical, Hemingway threw himself into supporting the Loyalist side in the Spanish civil war. He covered it as a corrrespondent and drew from the experience another fine novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Although Hemingway remained a public personality, his literary career went downhill, in part because of his alcoholism. He recovered some ground with a novella, The Old Man and the Sea, in 1952. An elemental tale about a heroic Cuban fisherman, the book won the Pulitzer Prize and positioned Hemingway for the Nobel Prize for literature, which he won in 1954. Thereafter he slipped into illness and depression, eventually killing himself with a favorite shotgun. Several works published posthumously have added little to his reputation. But his memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast (1964), is full of rich observation and telling detail, including some savage attacks on fellow writers.

War was Hemingway's element. Although he stripped it of its glory, he remained profoundly fascinated by its brutality and violence--and the way it challenged men's traditional values. Oddly, he was unable to write successful fiction about World War II, which he also covered as a correspondent. Hemingway was at his best portraying men enduring defeat stoically, with grace and courage. A victorious war apparently left him artistically baffled. His attempt to create a philosophy out of his love of violence and danger was a failure. But his unforgettable prose style, the concentrated power of his best stories and novels, guarantee him a secure niche in American literature.

Bibliography:

Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969); Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will (1977).

Author:

Thomas Fleming

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.

1899–1961, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Oak Park, Ill. one of the great American writers of the 20th cent.

Life

The son of a country doctor, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star after graduating from high school in 1917. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver in France 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 the expatriate 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 then settled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After his expulsion from Cuba by the Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. He was increasingly plagued by ill health and mental problems, and in July, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself.

Work

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. His celebrated literary style, influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, is direct, terse, and often monotonous, 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 literary style. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), he was recognized as the spokesman of the “lost generation” (so called by Gertrude Stein). The novel concerns a group of psychologically bruised, disillusioned expatriates living in postwar Paris, who take psychic refuge in such immediate physical 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 an ambulance driver and an English nurse. Hemingway also published such volumes of short stories as Men 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,” “The Undefeated,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway's nonfiction works, Death in the Afternoon (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 Bell Tolls (1940), which, in detailing an incident in the war, argues for human brotherhood. His novella The 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 the River 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; the novels Islands in the Stream (1970) and True at First Light (1999), a safari saga begun in 1954 and edited by his son Patrick; and The Nick Adams Stories (1972), a collection that includes previously unpublished pieces.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by C. Baker (1989) and ed. by M. J. Bruccoli (1996); M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology (1991); biographies by C. Baker (1969, rev. ed. 1980), J. Meyers (1986), M. S. Reynolds (5 vol. 1987–99), K. Lynn (1988), and J. R. Mellow (1993); P. Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (2d ed. 1966); C. Baker, Hemingway, the Writer as Artist (4th ed. 1972), H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War (1989), J. McLendon, Papa (1990).

(1899-1961)

1923	Three Stories & Ten Poems. Hemingway's first publication is brought out by Robert McAlmon's Paris Contact Publishing Company. The stories included are "Out of Season," "My Old Man," and "Up in Michigan." The first two would become part of In Our Time (1925); the third, about a seduction and rape, was removed from this collection at the insistence of the publisher.
1924	in our time. The vignettes that would become the interchapters of In Our Time (1925) are published in Paris. To Hemingway, the relationship between these brief scenes typifying contemporary life and the stories in that volume is "Like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coastline, and then looking at it with 15x binoculars."
1925	In Our Time. Readers are introduced to the soon-to-be-famous stripped-down Hemingway style and the character Nick Adams in this masterful collection of fifteen stories, framed by the brief prose vignettes previously published in Paris as in our time (1924). The volume, which attempts to characterize what it is like to live "in our time" amid continual violence and threat, includes some of Hemingway's finest stories, such as "Indian Camp," "The Battler," "Soldier's Home," and "Big Two-Hearted River."
1926	The Torrents of Spring. Hemingway's first novel is a labored burlesque of the Chicago school of writers and its leading figure, Sherwood Anderson. Hemingway's second novel, The Sun Also Rises, also is published in 1926. It describes the postwar angst and malaise of a group of expatriates who love and quarrel in Paris and Pamplona, Spain, during the annual running of the bulls. Regarded as a prose echoing of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the novel helps define the postwar generation and its values and is perhaps Hemingway's greatest accomplishment as a novelist.
1927	Men Without Women. Hemingway's second short story collection contains some of his best work, including "The Undefeated," "The Killers," and what is perhaps the central example of the author's "iceberg principle" of omission, "Hills Like White Elephants," in which a couple "discusses" an abortion and their failed marriage without ever bringing up the subjects.
1929	A Farewell to Arms. The author's war wound and love affair with a nurse during World War I in Italy provide the basis for his third novel. Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley make a separate peace after the disastrous Caporetto retreat (regarded by many as among the greatest fictional depictions of warfare) to Switzerland, but Catherine's death in childbirth makes Hemingway's point that violent death is a constant of the human condition.
1932	Death in the Afternoon. Bullfighting as existential and artistic metaphor is Hemingway's subject in this discourse, which interweaves the history and practices of bullfighting with observations on death, modern literature, and the art of living. The book is an essential source for understanding Hemingway's philosophy of combat and "grace under pressure."
1933	Winner Take Nothing. This short story collection includes important works such as "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "A Way You'll Never Be," "Homage to Switzerland," and "A Natural History of the Dead."
1935	Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway's account of an African safari is, in the author's words, an attempt "to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination." Most reviewers decide that he failed, but the work retains its major significance today as a repository for Hemingway's reflections on his art and literature.
1937	To Have and Have Not. Hemingway's only novel of the 1930s is the often cynically brutal story of Key West "conch" Harry Morgan, who is forced by economic necessity into illegal activities. His realization on the point of death that "One man alone ain't got... no chance" demonstrates Hemingway's increasing social concerns and his acknowledgment of the need for collective action, both derived from the writer's experiences in Spain. Reviewers, although impressed by some of the novel's passages and episodes, generally see in the novel signs of Hemingway's decline.
1938	The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories. Hemingway's only play is combined with his collected stories, including recent ones such as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The Fifth Column, set during the siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, would be produced on Broadway in 1940.
1938	The Spanish Earth. Transcript of Hemingway's narration and commentary for the 1937 film documentary on the Spanish Civil War, produced and directed by Joris Ivens with a screenplay by Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, and Lillian Hellman.
1940	For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway's novel of the Spanish Civil War, arguably his most ambitious work, tells the story of Robert Jordan's mission to blow up a bridge vital to an upcoming Republican offensive. Written in a burst of creative energy, it counters the notion that Hemingway is a spent force. "Hemingway the artist is with us again," declares critic Edmund Wilson, "and it is like having an old friend back."
1942	Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. Hemingway supplies an introduction for this compilation of factual and fictional war stories he selected together with William Kozlenko.
1950	Across the River and into the Trees. Hemingway's first novel in a decade concerns aging army colonel Robert Cantwell's trip to revisit the place where he was wounded in World War I. Generally regarded as one of Hemingway's weakest books, it is viewed as the bitter work of a defeated man whose writing skills have failed him.
1952	The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway's moving parable about humanity's struggle to survive in a hostile world helps the writer recapture critical approval. Some regard this novella, about an aged Cuban fisherman's futile attempts to save his catch of a giant marlin from preying sharks, as Hemingway's greatest work. The Old Man and the Sea is mentioned prominently when Hemingway is awarded the Nobel Prize two years later.
1964	A Moveable Feast. A posthumously published collection of sketches about the writer's life and acquaintances in Paris during the early 1920s. Together with a nostalgia for the past and the city, Hemingway shows a mean-spirited attitude toward his rival and sometime friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1970	Islands in the Stream. Hemingway's posthumously published novel features the recollections of a lonely painter who much resembles Hemingway himself. It is the first of several discarded or abandoned Hemingway fragments to appear. John Updike calls it "a gallant wreck of a novel" being "paraded as the real thing."
1981	Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Edited by Carlos Baker, this volume offers a representative sampling of Hemingway's correspondence. Both his noble, sensitive side and his crass, bullying side are displayed. Baker includes the writer's letters to his parents and to famous writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos.
1985	The Dangerous Summer. This book reprints a long article commissioned by Life magazine in 1959, dealing with bullfighting and including Hemingway's reflections about the 1950s.
1986	The Garden of Eden. At his death Hemingway left more than three thousand pages of manuscript, including novels he was still working on. This posthumous publication is autobiographical and concerns an author's first two marriages. The work is noteworthy for its exploration of the nature of sex and male-female relationships, demonstrating a less macho side of the author.

Quotes:

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."

"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts."

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

See more famous quotes by Ernest Hemingway