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1. CONTEXTUALIZATION: Ernest Hemingway wrote stories from 1923-1960, focusing on World War I, World War II, and the Spanish
Civil War. Some stories were centered in the American West, as well as the Caribbean, especially Cuba. Over the span of
his life, Hemingway completed 60 short stories. His short story collections are Three Stories and Ten Poems, 1923;
In Our Time, 1924 (enlarged edition, 1925); Men Without Women, 1927; Winner Take Nothing, 1933; The Fifth Column and the First
forty-nine Stories, 1938; The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, 1961; The Nick Adams Stories, 1972, The Old Man and
The Sea (novella, won Nobel Prize 1954). All of his stories are conveniently collected in the Finca Vigia edition The Complete
Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway spent much time as an outdoorsman in the American Midwest, and wrote many short stories about nature, especially
in The Nick Adams Stories. He was also a reporter for a Kansas City newspaper, where he developed a terse and easily readable
style. A great influence was WWI, in which Hemingway served as a volunteer ambulance driver, leading him to write his most
famous novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, whose understated, ironic style he derived from his journalistic
sense and from his compact short stories. He also wrote on big-game hunting that he did in Africa, and became an icon of
manly adventure.
2. SALIENT POINTS: The stories of Hemingway are permeated by the theme of existentialism--a philosophical belief that
existence, instead of his essence, was the key to understanding life, in which pleasures, hardships and cruelties were not
caused by supernatural forces, but by his or her own abilities, or lack of them, to handle circumstances. In terms of writing
style, Hemingway was sparse and direct, using short, simple sentences in a journalistic manner. Hemingway was the leading
spokesman for The Lost Generation, a group of writers who expressed the feelings of war-wounded people, disillusioned by the
loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that they turned to a stoic acceptance
of primal emotions. The stories of Hemingway are mainly concerned with tough people, either intelligent men and women who
have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians, and professional athletes, whose essential
courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society.
3. INFLUENCE ON THE SHORT STORY: Hemingway was a war reporter who kept the theme of war central to his fiction. His background
in journalism allowed him to perfect a sparse, punchy fictional style, which he introduced into his creative efforts. Hemingway,
who himself owes a debt to, among others, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Gertrude Stein, has exerted an influence on the
direction of American fiction which is perhaps greater than all of these other writers combined. His greatest contribution,
as the Nobel Prize committee acknowledged, was in the area of prose style. In his use of the zero ending, which goes counter
to the traditional ending, Hemingway has influenced the form of the modern short story. Finally, by depicting the plight
of the disenchanted, lost group of post-World-War I expatriates, he influenced an entire generation of writers and artists,
bringing into print for the first time, in the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), the phrase The Lost Generation.
The stories of Hemingway run counter to the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century stories. They are usually
elliptical in form, rarely tying up details in a neat bundle in order to bring the stories to a conclusion. The type of story
Hemingway wrote, as Sheldon Grebstein has noted, reflects a belief in Anton Chekhov's dictum that in both scene and character
the selection of significant details, grouped so as to convey an image, is the vital thing.
4. CONNECTIONS TO OUR CLASS: Hemingway was a contemporary of Sherwood Anderson, and their work shares a number of important
similarities. Like the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway characters are grotesques made so by war or natural hardship.
Both writers feature characters who desperately long for something--love, success, money--yet meet with impossible odds.
These authors frequently devoted their stories to investigating how different human beings approach their disappointment.
Hemingway has similarities to Jack London, as both writers rely heavily on characters who like to or have to travel, and
naturalism. In the work of both, nature is cruel and unforgiving, yet Hemingway does not kill his heroes: the line from
The Old Man and the Sea for which he is famous--That which does not kill us only makes us stronger--is more optimistic than
the philosophy encountered in London or Anderson.
Hemingway took inspiration from Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. From Crane, Hemingway drew an ability
to give quick brush-strokes of detail, and he refers to Crane several times in Green Hills of Africa and A Moveable Feast.
In By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, pp. 217-219, he mentions several books and writers that are essential reading for a young novelist;
among these, The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane. Of Twain, Hemingway claimed All modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from
the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from
that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. Finally, the powerful style of Ambrose Bierce in depicting
war inspired Hemingway. Comradeship, toughness, sensitivity and indomitable spirit permeate the work of both war writers.
Material was collected from these websites:
http://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/cuba.html
http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/books.htm
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/hemstories.htm
http://www.ala.org/ala/ppo/currentprograms/storylines/
nickadams.pdf
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-existentialism/intro.html
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/queries05.htm
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap5/twain.html
http://www.lostgeneration.com/
http://www.questia.com/library/book/
american-literary-naturalism-a-divided-stream-by-
charles-child-walcutt.jsp?CRID=american-
literary-naturalism-a-divided-stream-by-charles-child-
walcutt&OFFID=se2qbp&KEY=american%20literary%20naturalism
http://www.bookrags.com/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea
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