Ernest Hemingway

In honor of this weeks discussion on Ernest Hemingway, I included some of his background information regarding his early works, including "The Sun Also Rises". I hope everyone finds it helpful and interesting.

Ernest Hemingway began his career as a writer working for a newspaper in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. He joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army after America entered the First World War. He was wounded while serving at the front, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. Upon his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution. Like all great writers, Hemingway wrote what he knew and many of his stories coincided with actual events occurring during certain times of his life. His personal life became so involved with his work that the two are virtually inseparable. It can be said with justification that the characters in his works are real people and in assuming that events and attitudes in the fiction directly correspond with those in Hemingway's personal life.

At the age of twenty-six, Hemingway had his first novel published, in 1926, titled The Torrents of Spring. The novel is viewed as a “hilarious parody, poking fun at that ‘great race’ of writers, it depicts a vogue that Hemingway himself refused to follow. A highly entertaining story, The Torrents of Spring offers a rare glimpse into Hemingway's early career as a storyteller and stylist” (Amazon). The book was made into a movie in 1989.

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, published in 1926, the same year as The Torrents of Spring. “F. Scott Fitzgerald described Hemingway’s book as ‘a romance and a guidebook.’ It also became, in the words of critic Sibbie O’Sullivan, ‘a modern-day courtesy book on how to behave in the waste land Europe had become after the Great War’” (Satoris). The Sun Also Rises successfully portrays its characters as survivors of a misplaced and confused generation. The material for the novel resulted from a journey Hemingway made with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends to Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. Among them was Lady Duff Twysden, a beautiful socialite with whom Hemingway was in love and the inspiration for the novel’s Lady Brett Ashley. There was also a Jewish novelist and boxer named Harold Loeb, source of Robert Cohn, whom Hemingway threatened after learning that he and Lady Duff had had an affair. Lady Duff’s companion was a bankrupt Briton as is the character Mike Campbell. The trip ended poorly when Lady Duff and her companion left their bills unpaid. The ending of the novel is only slightly more heartbreaking, yet it recovers that precious value which makes life livable in a war-wearied world: friendship (Frenz).

The Twenties and the Black Renaissance

The Twenties and the Black Renaissance

Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson devoted a section of their book, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, to the age when black artists emerged to form their own culture and revealed themselves to have always been gifted with talent, the Harlem Renaissance. The authors discuss the lack of culture found in America up to the savagery of World War I and while many white American artist were disgusted with their country and fled to new havens, such as Paris, “most black people had a proud sense of being Americans, and they strongly felt wit was time to shuck off the stereotyped limitations imposed on them historically, including the old denial of their artistic ability” (115). African-Americans were so determined to cut the ties of history, they fled from the Confederate states to the safety of the northern cities to improve their lives which is why “the black population of New York rose from 91, 709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930, Harlemites proudly called it ‘the black capital of the world’” (115).

Bearden and Henderson wrote this section of their book, it would seem, to refute the belief that black art began during the Harlem Renaissance, when in truth, black art had been around for decades. It was only that the Harlem Renaissance during 1922-1934 gave African-Americans the chance to emerge from the woodworks to reveal their artistic abilities without consequences. Many black artists, as the authors reveal, still “struggled with acceptance into the white world, but with determination and perseverance, black artists such as W.H. Johnson, August Savage and Cloyd L. boykin, did earn the chance to present their work in private collections set up by prominent white men, such as H.L. Mencken”; paving the way for younger generations of black artists to be accepted in the social, literary and artistic world (118).

Work-Cited
Bearden, Romare. Henderson, Harry. "A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the
Present". Pantheon Books. New York, New York. 1993.

Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen's Passing has been the main topic in class this week. Larsen appears to be an interesting author and I really liked the idea of a writer discussing such an event as a black woman passing herself off as a white woman. Those individuals who did this must have been desperate to fit it, which might explain why Clare was such a wreck and never truly happy. I found out that Larsen was an American novelist and short story writer famously associated with the Harlem Renaissance era, which one writer has called "an era of extraordinary acheivement in black American art and literature areas during the 1920's and 1930's." Nella Larsen's appearance was much like that of Homer Plessy, a civil rights activist, who was seven eights white and one eights black. Plessy believed that he should be entitled to all the rights and privileges of a white citizen. As a result, Plessy took his case to the Supreme Court which ruled for "separate but equal public facilities and institutions for non-white citizens." Nella was a light skinned black women with limp hair and white facial features. Nella Larsen was born on April 13,1891, in Chicago and died on March 30,1964. http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/nlarsen.html