Posted on 07/03/2011 3:32:15 PM PDT by Borges
Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand almost 50 years ago, on July 2, 1961. His fame rests on his evocative stories crafted in spare prose, his tragic romances of love and death, his vivid war reporting and his travel books. He was an uneven author, but wrote at least one great work in every decade of his career. His description of the Greek refugees retreating after a Turkish victory—"Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats"—appeared in his first and best book of stories, "In Our Time" (1925). The novelist Ford Madox Ford praised the perfection of Hemingway's pure, skeptical and stoical style by observing, "his pages have the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water."
"The Sun Also Rises" (1926), published during the Prohibition era in the U.S., portrayed the self-destructive life of U.S. expatriates in France and Spain as personified by Jake Barnes, rendered impotent by a war wound. Jake's hopeless love for Brett Ashley, a promiscuous and exciting English aristocrat, provides the core of the novel. But his tragedy is assuaged by the beauty of the natural landscape, which "abideth forever," and by the hope of a new and more promising generation.
"A Farewell to Arms" (1929) develops the brilliant opening sentence of "In Another Country" (1927): "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more." Hemingway portrays his bitter disillusionment in the wounding of Frederic Henry, the retreat from Caporetto, the arduous escape by rowboat into Switzerland and the death of Catherine Barkley in childbirth.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Maybe you should actually try reading something he wrote. You’re probably basing your opinions about him by movies made from his books in the 70s. Don’t trust that.
In my opinion, Hemingway was:
The definitive American writer of the 20th century.
A piece of shit as a husband, father, and friend.
Exceptionally courageous, but a coward in the end (suicide).
A great, big, conflicted, imperfect, tortured, asshole of a genius.
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