ERNEST HEMINGWAY

-ANDRONE BIANCA-IONELA-
• Ernest Miller Hemingway, American novelist and
short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense
masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and
widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose
style exerted a powerful influence on American and
British fiction in the 20th century.
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in
Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a
writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City
at the age of seventeen. After the United
States entered the First World War, 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 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 (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.
“A FAREWELL TO ARMS”

“A Farewell to Arms”, directed by

Frank Borzage is the first, so far, of
three screen adaptations to Ernest
Hemingway’s classic 1930 novel.
This movie received the Oscars for
Best Cinematography and Best
Sound and was nominated for Best
Picture and Best Art Direction.
• The film tells the love story between Frederic Henry
and Catherine Barkley. Frederic Henry is an American
who has enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Italian
Army during the First World War. Catherine Barkley is a
war nurse. The war becomes secondary when he meets
and falls in love with Catherine. They are kept apart by
Major Rinaldi, Frederic’s Italian friend, who not only
loves Catherine, but doesn’t want him to “lose his head
over a women”.
 This plays out well and there is a good
chemistry between Gary Cooper and Helen
Hayes as Fredric and Catherine. Adolphe Menjou
is solid as Rinaldi; a slightly ambiguous character
who serves to bring the two protagonists
together and later keep them apart. While the
battle scenes may not be brutal and large scale as
those in more modern films they are intense
thanks to the way it focuses on Fredric and those
around him.
 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), a
substantial and impressive work that some
critics consider his finest novel, in
preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was
also the most successful of all his books as
measured in sales.
• 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.
• All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in A
Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For
Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates—and,
as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as
a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air
Force.
 He also participated in the
liberation of Paris, and, although
ostensibly a journalist, he
impressed professional soldiers not
only as a man of courage in battle
but also as a real expert in military
matters, guerrilla activities, and
intelligence collection.

Ernest Hemingway with a dead Cape buffalo, on safari

in Kenya, 1953.
• 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) and The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway
died in Idaho in 1961.
Thank you!