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Cuba, the Old Man, the Sea: Hemingway Began As Reporter, Later Became Novelist

Posted on: Wednesday, 10 May 2006, 09:09 CDT

By The Dominion Post, Morgantown, W.Va.

May 10--Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Ill., started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at age 17. After the United States entered World War I, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After 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.

During the 1920s, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, "The Sun Also Rises" (1926). Equally successful was "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. 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). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway -- himself a great sportsman -- liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters -- tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in "Men Without Women" (1927), "The Fifth Column" and the "First Forty-Nine Stories" (1938). Hemingway committed suicide in Idaho in 1961.

FROM NOBEL LECTURES, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Dominion Post, Morgantown, W.Va.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Dominion Post (Morgantown, W.Va.)

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