|
 |
“He is without question one of the most courageous men I have ever known. Fear was a stranger to him.”
—Colonel “Buck” Lanham
|
 |
American author and Nobel Prize winner (1899-1961). Has written some of the most famous Prose Fiction in the English language. First 20th Century writer to get away with the word "fuck". Master of Beige Prose. Wounded in World War I, covered (and, despite the Geneva Convention, fought in) the sequel (and the Spanish Civil War too). Famously went on calmly eating his dinner while a shell destroyed the restaurant where he was dining. Idolized Theodore Roosevelt (TR's cousin, not so much). Wrestled lions. Flew airplanes. Caught big fish. Was a Chick Magnet (married four times in as many decades). Encouraged a young J.D. Salinger. Made Mojitos and Daiquiris manly. Has a Cuban cigar named after him (although he didn't smoke cigars and apparently gave up cigarettes in later life too). Told tall tales about himself (but made them entertaining). Grandfather of Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. Survived no fewer than nine concussions. Shot himself. Shortly before his suicide, claimed to a friend that the FBI was monitoring him. He was right.
And he had a dark side. He started drinking as a teenager and never stopped (though he always denied being an alcoholic). He was probably bipolar, at turns loving and abusive toward his loved ones, and was eventually estranged from two of his kids. Nevertheless, the impact he had on literature can't be denied, and his eventful life makes his work all the more interesting.
One of the most Memetic Badass writers in western literature. (Did you see the part about wrestling lions?) The Most Interesting Man in the World is pretty much an expy of him. And interesting he was, to put it mildly.
Works:[]
- The Sun Also Rises (1927)
- A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
- A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous)
- Death In The Afternoon
Portrayals In Fiction:[]
- Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012)
- Voiced by Jeff Daniels in Ken Burns' Hemingway (2021)
Associated Tropes:[]
- Can't Take Criticism: Hemingway did not respond well to unfavorable critical reviews of his work. Once, when he encountered a critic who had reviewed one of his non-fiction works unfavorably years earlier, he pummeled the man with a book. Even his own wives weren't immune to his violent outbursts, when they dared to criticize him.
- Driven to Suicide : The last few years of his life were one trauma after another, and the combination of years of alcohol abuse and probable damage to his brain from nine concussions didn't help. He also talked about or threatened suicide many times previously, even as early as his twenties. Suicidal ideation ran in his family, as his own father and two of his sisters also took their own lives, as would his granddaughter Margaux years later.
- Gratuitous Rape: One of his early short stories, "Up in Michigan," is about a young man who drunkenly forces himself on his girlfriend despite her protests. It did not appear in his first mass-published collection of short stories, In Our Time, because none other than Gertrude Stein told him it was unprintable.
- Rated "M" for Manly: Hemingway was the epitome of manhood, as described above. Yet at the same time he played with gender roles in his relationship with his last wife, referring to himself as "Catherine." As a toddler, his mother had dressed him and his sister as twins (in both boys' and girls' clothing).
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: He wrote a particularly nasty one to his editor about From Here to Eternity and its author, James Jones, after he was asked to read the novel and give his thoughts. "I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs, nor suck a boil to know it is a boil, nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot," Hemingway wrote, adding that he hoped Jones would kill himself.
- Hemingway was himself the recipient of a scathing one (also in letter form) from transgender daughter Gloria, after the sudden death of Gloria's mother, Pauline Pfeiffer, after Gloria's arrest for marijuana possession (or according to some sources, for using a women's restroom). Hemingway and Gloria both blamed each other, with Gloria calling her father a "gin-soaked, abusive monster" and telling him he was a failure as a husband, father and writer. Those words came back to haunt her when her father killed himself.
- The Rival: He met his match in his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, a fellow writer and journalist who wouldn't stand for being pushed around and could give as good as she got. The rivalry between them escalated toward the end of their marriage, when he became resentful that she pressured him into going to Europe to cover World War II (which he did not want to do) and did all he could to sabotage her career. Still, she managed to one-up him by getting onto Omaha Beach at D-Day when he had not been able to, and it was she, not he, who officially ended their relationship. He hated her for the rest of his life.
- Signature Style: The "iceberg theory": leave out everything you can.
- Beige Prose: He omits needless words.
- Show, Don't Tell: Vivid physical descriptions and serious research avoid the topic at hand. "Hills Like White Elephants" is an argument about an operation. "Big Two-Hearted River" depicts a man focusing exclusively on fishing.
- Subtext/FridgeBrilliance: The actual point of the story is always left out. Sometimes the climax is too: "Out Of Season" ends before the twist.
- Slap Slap Kiss: Many of his marriages followed this pattern, though Martha Gellhorn was the only one of his four wives to strike back at him in any meaningful way.
- Ungrateful Bastard: His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was a trust-fund baby who provided him with a sizeable financial cushion and dedicated her life to making him happy. He thanked her by having an affair (with Martha Gellhorn, who would become his third wife) and then told her she deserved it because she had broken up his first marriage.
- Write What You Know: He wrote about World War I where he served as an ambulance driver and the Spanish Civil War where he was present as a journalist. He also wrote stories about hunting, fishing and boxing, all things he had personal experience with.