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).