Striking evidence of this is the movie of The Old Man and the Sea ; it's hard to imagine a book less suited to the big screen, and yet Hemingway's celebrity at the time of its publication was so massive that Hollywood had virtually no choice but to film the novella. The publication of recovered fragments from the writer's unpublished oeuvre has never failed to make headlines worldwide, from A Moveable Feast in to the so-called "fictional memoir" True at First Light , in Like those of Shakespeare and Einstein, Hemingway's face is recognized by millions who have never read a word he wrote.
Hemingway achieved more than celebrity, however. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then he was a great writer indeed. Especially after reading A Farewell to Arms , Hemingway's influence is easy to discern in an enormous number of the writers who have followed him. This influence has taken three forms: thematic, stylistic, and the "Papa" Hemingway lifestyle.
As the literary critic Leslie Fiedler argues in his study Love and Death in the American Novel , the classic American literary hero is a soldier, sailor, or cowboy who is brave, laconic, and ultimately alone. From Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans through Moby-Dick 's Ishmael and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, these characters "light out for the territories" because they don't quite fit in polite society, and they quickly learn self-sufficiency in the wilderness, at sea, or in combat.
Hemingway, who identified Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the source of all American literature, recognized this archetype, then updated and refined it. The overriding theme of his stories and books was "grace under pressure" — specifically, the ability of "men without women" the title of an early story collection to remain calm and competent in the face of life-threatening violence.
Thus, Hemingway heroes like Frederic Henry stoically accept not only war wounds, but the pain of losing whom they love, as well. Think of Henry walking into the rain after the agonizing death of his lover and child at the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms.
Whether handling firearms, betting on horses, or ordering wine, they are almost scarily adept at what they do, and when the universe conspires to defeat them, they never complain.
The influence of the Hemingway hero can therefore be seen in many of the literary soldiers who followed in Henry's footsteps: for instance, the protagonist of James Salter's The Hunters , an account of the exploits of a Korean War jet pilot squadron. Nearly every character Humphrey Bogart ever played onscreen was influenced by the Hemingway hero. Hemingway's influence has been even more pronounced in the realm of prose style. In his first collection of stories and thereafter, he combined elements from Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and journalism to create a radically modern approach to the writing of sentences and paragraphs distinguished by the following hallmarks:.
An emphasis on nouns and verbs rather than adjectives and adverbs. This is closely related to Hemingway's preference for the actual versus the abstract. His style is called simple and deliberate, every word written as if carved in granite. Yet his prose is among the most sensitive and beautifully understated, often having the power to completely transport the reader to the place and situation of his characters. It's the art that hides art.
Many have copied his seemingly uncomplicated style but have learned through their failure how very difficult it is to create the illusion of simplicity. For me, Hemingway is a phenomenologist a term he probably would have disparaged. He experiences the world as it appears and feels, then writes about it in such a way as to have the reader experience it the same way—the surface sensation, the taste, the just-right view, the feel on the back of the neck, the urgency, the peace, the restless thoughts.
All without seeming to make an effort to do so. It all goes down like a drink of water but you eventually realize you've been moved by a powerful liquor. He's the master of forcing the reader to read between the lines, whether the reader wants to or not. In Death in the Afternoon, he notes: "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.
Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Illinois, U. He gained his early reputation though as a writer of short stories that appeared quirky and abrupt to readers then, but have been imitated ever since and now seem perfectly natural. His first widely available collection of stories was In Our Time published while he was a foreign correspondent in Paris. In retrospect the stories of In Our Time have been hailed as having changed American short story writing forever.
Hemingway's first longer-form writing to be published was The Torrents of Spring , a slender parody of Sherwood Anderson, once his idol and others of the "great race" of writers of the time. He wrote the novella, supposedly in ten days, to get out of a publishing contract.
Fitzgerald, a deft hand at satire himself, called the book a masterpiece but it's been mainly forgotten in light of Hemingway's greater works that followed. Today a reader of The Torrents of Spring would likely find parts quite funny but miss much of what was being parodied. Around this time Hemingway also completed his first acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises about a foreign correspondent in Paris, like himself, who takes time out to visit the bullfights in Spain with other members of the so-called "lost generation".
This is the work that brought him to prominence. Like most of his books from this time on, it was eventually adapted for movies with middling success. It's hard to replicate his writing style on screen. The Sun Also Rises was followed by another story collection, Men Without Women , containing his famous story "The Killers" , and another novel, A Farewell to Arms —a doomed wartime love story that confirmed his reputation as the preeminent writer of his generation.
Farewell was quickly made into a Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes film , the first of several adaptations , and both The Sun Also Rises and "The Killers" eventually got their multiple adaptations.
The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in , and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in After surviving two plane crashes in Africa in , Hemingway became increasingly anxious and depressed. On July 2, , he killed himself with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
His father had died by suicide in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On July 21, , terrorists attempt to attack the London transit system by planting bombs on three subways and on one bus; none of the bombs detonate completely. The attempted attack came exactly two weeks after terrorists killed 56 people, including themselves, and wounded Three months after the Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter, Union military command still believed that the He had suffered punctured eardrums, some burns and minor wounds, but Hollywood movies and dime novels notwithstanding, the classic western showdown—also called a walkdown—happened only rarely in the American West.
Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
0コメント