Ernest Miller Hemingway (Authors)

(July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation". He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."

- Ernest Hemingway - Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure". Many of his works are now considered classics of American literature.

Spanish Civil War and Hemingway

In 1936, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. While there, Hemingway broke his friendship with John Dos Passos because, despite warnings, Dos Passos continued to report on the atrocities of not only the fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also those of the elected and radicalised left-leaning Republicans whom he favoured; characteristically, Hemingway spread a story that Dos Passos had fled Spain out of cowardice. In this context Hemingway's colleague and associate Herbert Matthews, who would become more well known for his favourable reports on Fidel Castro, showed a similar predilection for the Republican side as Hemingway. Hemingway, who was a convert to Catholicism during his marriage to his wife Pauline, began to question his religion at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The war also strained Hemingway's marriage. Pauline Pfieffer was a devout Catholic and, as such, sided with the fascist, pro-Catholic regime of Franco, whereas Hemingway mostly supported the Republican government, for all his criticisms of it. During this time, Hemingway wrote a little known essay, The Denunciation, which would not be published until 1969 within a collection of stories, the Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical, suggesting that Hemingway might have been an informant for the Republic as well as a weapons instructor during the war.

In the spring of 1939, Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the Republicans, ending the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida, home due to his 1940 divorce.

A few weeks after the divorce, he married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, his third wife.

His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940. It was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West, and was finished in July 1940. The long work, which is set during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish soldiers on the Republican side. It was largely based on Hemingway's experience of living in Spain and reporting on the war. It is one of his most notable literary accomplishments.