Ernest Hemingway has become known as one of the greatest author’s in American literature. His life and writing were shaped by war, and his experiences during it ultimately led to his disillusion of the valor and grace that is so often attributed to warfare. In today’s increasingly militarized world, students must understand that there is no glamour in war, and there is no better author to explain this sentiment than Ernest Hemingway.
To understand how Hemingway developed his beliefs, his life must be examined. Ernest Hemingway was born was on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois and had a very unusual childhood. For the first six years of his life, Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, would dress him and treat him like a girl. She did this because it was her dream to have twin daughters, and Hemingway’s mother made him play the part with his
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Later that year, he went on a camping trip with some high school friends in an effort to clear his head. This camping trip came to inspire his short story Big Two-Hearted River, in which the semi-autobiographical character of Nick Adams goes to the countryside to find solitude after returning home from war (Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River). After working for a short time as an editor for the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, Hemingway moved to Paris to become a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. While in Paris, Hemingway became friends with many other influential writers and artists of the ‘Lost Generation’ (a term that Hemingway himself popularized in his famous book The Sun Also Rises). Among these were Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, whom he developed a life long friendship with. During this time, he wrote many short stories and essays, and completed his first novel The Sun Also