LoC Blog: Ernest Hemingway

On July 21, 1899, Dr. Clarence Hemingway stepped onto the porch of his Oak Park, Illinois home and blew his cornet to announce the birth of his son, Ernest. During Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood, his family spent much time at their cottage near Walloon Lake in northern Michigan where his father enjoyed hunting and other sports. The love for the great outdoors and the physically active life his father instilled in him remained with Hemingway for the rest of his life.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon. (New York: Scribner, 1932), 192.

After graduating from high school, Hemingway worked briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star before volunteering for service in World War I. Excluded from regular military duty because of a defective eye, he worked as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was badly injured. Hemingway drew on his wartime experience of falling in love with his nurse while recuperating in a Milan hospital as background for his novel A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway returned to Europe after the war, working in Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. There, he became part of a group of expatriate American artists and writers who would come to be known as the “Lost Generation,” a term coined by writer Gertrude Stein and used by Hemingway as an epigraph to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Hemingway developed a passion for Spain and for the country’s national sport of bullfighting, and he worked there as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. As a reporter during World War II, Hemingway flew several missions with the Royal Air Force, crossed the English Channel with the American troops on D-Day, and participated in the liberation of Paris. His remarkable adventures found their way into books such as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Is there any chance that we might send guys to the war not to write govt. publications or propaganda but so as to have something good written afterwards?…What do you think? Maybe I could be the accredited correspondent for the Library of Congress? Write me about it seriously will you?

The final paragraph of this 1943 letter includes an appeal to Hemingway’s friend, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, the poet and dramatist who, at that time, was also serving as assistant director of the Office of War Information. Although MacLeish was unable to grant him accreditation, Hemingway did become a foreign correspondent during World War II. In the letter, Hemingway also writes of Ezra Pound’s problems and makes suggestions as to how the poet’s friends might help him.

Letter, Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish discussing Ezra Pound’s mental health and other literary matters, August 10, 1943. Archibald MacLeish Papers, 1907-1981. Manuscript Division

Hemingway received a Pulitzer Prize External in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature External in 1954. Suffering from anxiety and depression, Hemingway took his own life in 1961. His use of terse prose and dialogue, and short simple sentences stripped of emotional rhetoric, is perhaps the most frequently appropriated writing style of the twentieth century.

via https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/july-21#ernest-hemingway