Hemingway Short Stories Ernest Hemingway: His life and his stories Ernest Hemingway was man of many words. He wrote many novels and short stories. Ernest Hemingway also led a hard life.
He often incorporated his life into his stories. His life and work was a direct result of his life. Some of his stories show a direct relationship between his life and his work. Looking at three of Hemingway’s short stories, ” Soldier’s Home,” “A Cat in the Rain” and ” A Clean Well-Lighted Place, in terms of their relationship to events and experiences in Hemingway’s own life. His stories from World War I reflect deeping despairs, and a conviction that life ultimately was without meaning.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21,1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was the owner of a prosperous real estate business. His father, Dr. Hemingway, imparted to Ernest the importance of appearances, especially in public.
Dr. Hemingway invented surgical forceps for which he did not accept money. He believed that one should not profit from something important for the good of mankind. Ernest’s father, a man of high ideals, was very strict and censored the books he allowed his children to read.
He forbade his Ernest’s sister from studying ballet for it was coeducational, and dancing together led to “hell and damnation” Grace hall Hemingway, Ernest’s mother, considered herself pure and proper. She was a dreamer who was upset at anything which disturbed her perception of the world as beautiful. She hater dirty diapers, upset stomachs, and cleaning house; they were not fit for a lady. She taught her children to always act with decorum. She adored the singing of the birds and the smell of flowers.
Her children were expected to behave properly and to please her, always. Mrs. Hemingway treated Ernest, when he was a small boy, as if he were a female baby doll and she dressed him accordingly. This arrangement was all right until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a “gun-toting Pawnee Bill”. He began, at the time, to pull away from his mother, and never forgave her for his humiliation. The town of Oak Park, where Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and quite religious.
The townspeople forbade the word “virgin” from appearing in schoolbooks, and the word “breast” was questioned, though it appeared in the Bible. Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he couldn’t get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved to tell stories to his classmates, often insisting that a friend listen to one of his stories. In spite of his mother’s desire, he played on the football team at Oak Park High School. As a student, Ernest was a perfectionist about his grammar and studied English with a fervor.
He contributed articles to the weekly school newspaper. It seems that the principal did not approve of Ernest’s writings and he complained, often, about the content of Ernest ‘s articles. Ernest was clear about his writing; he wanted people to “see and feel” and he wanted to enjoy himself while writing. Ernest loved having fun. If nothing was happening, mischievous Ernest made something happen. He would sometimes use forbidden words just to create a ruckus.
Ernest, though wild and crazy, was a warm, caring individual. He loved the sea, mountains and the stars and hated anyone who saw him a phony. During World War I, Ernest, rejected from service because of a bad left eye, was an ambulance driver, in Italy, for the Red Cross. Ernest was injured in his knee and recuperated in a hospital, tended by a caring nurse named Agnes.
He fell in love with this nurse. When he returned to the U.S. he embellished his war stories he won a medal for bravery. The is similar to the character Krebs in Hemingway” short story “Soldier’s Home.” When Krebs returned to the United States everyone had already told their war stories and his were not as exciting. So he felt the need to embellish his stories.’ Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it.”(Pg. 145 Hemingway) Hemingway was against telling people about the war at first because it caused him such pain, but later he felt that he had to talk about it.
Ernest returned home after the war, rejected by the nurse whom he fell in love. He would party late into the night and invite, to his house, people his parents disapproved of. Ernest’s mother rejected him and he felt that he had to move from home He moved in with a friend living in Chicago and he wrote articles for the Toronto Star. In Chicago he met and then married Hadley Richardson .
She believed that he should spend all his time in writing, and bought him a typewriter for his birthday. They decided that the best place for a writer to live is Paris, where he could devote himself to his writing. He said, at the time, that the most difficult thing to write about was being a man. They could not live on the income from his stories and so Ernest, again, wrote for the Toronto Star. Ernest took Hadley to Italy to show her where he had been during the war.
He was devastated, everything had changed, and everything was destroyed. Hadley became pregnant and was sick all the time. She and Ernest decided to move to Canada. Hadley gave birth to a boy who they named John Hadley Nicano Hemingway. Even though he had his family Ernest was unhappy and decided to return to Paris.
Ernest was still unhappy with his wife and son. They decided to divorce. After he divorced Hadely He married four other times, to Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh. In 1953 he went on a safari with Mary, and he was in heaven hunting big game. Though Ernest had a serious accident, and later became ill, he could never admit that he had any weaknesses; nothing would stop him, certainly not pain.
In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Toward the end, Ernest started to travel again, but almost the way that someone does whom knows that he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming paranoid and too forgets things. He became obsessed with sin; his upbringing was over feeling like a bad person, as his father, mother and grandfather had taught him. In the last year of his life, he lived inside of his dreams, similar to his mother, who he hated with all his heart.
He was suicidal and had electrical shock treatments for his depression and strange behavior On a Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed himsel …
