Kirsten Vogel
English M01-B
Professor Bessenbacher
12 December 2013
Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway is a world renowned writer who is known for his short and to-the-point yet unique style. While being greatly praised for his style he is also greatly criticized for it as well. His body of work includes numerous poems, short stories, and various novels as well. He even won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his story “The Old Man and the Sea.” The panelists awarded him for his overall mastery of the English language and for his modern unique way of narrating. Hemingway was one of the most famous people who represented the “lost generation”. This so-called group was a congregation of young writers who were some of the large contributors to the great collection of modern literature today. Some of these people were others who, like Hemingway, were somehow involved in World War I. Along with World War I, Hemingway was also a part of World War II. His history with women was not very good likely due to his lack of a mother-son bond throughout his childhood. He was also an alcoholic which greatly affected some of his writing. Some of his hobbies included fishing, boxing, and hunting. Early on he was hired as a reporter and a journalist. His style was to observe everything he saw and then to report on it in the most brief way possible, not overdoing it with too many unwanted details. Hemingway was known to be a very adventurous man & craftsmen who looked to get the most of out life that he could. He spent most of his time meticulously revising his work over and over. He wanted to make sure that his work was as short, brief, and lacking of detail as possible. He lived his life to the fullest and was known to be a very kind person to his acquaintances and family. But on the other hand he was very quick to get angry and always had a dark ominous cloud of his ever-present fear of death and failure hanging over him. These feelings greatly influenced his works as he shows this fear in many different pieces. Critics have called his work very pessimistic because there is usually this feeling of awareness of the nothingness that can be hidden by fame and fortune in his works. But below all this lies a deeper meaning that Hemingway wants to get through to his readers, a message of compassion and how much human existence and interaction matters to him. His work made a huge contribution to realism in American Literature and showed a new way for writers to capture what makes people act the way they do. Hemingway is most famous for his very short and undetailed style, his way of using rhythm, and the way he repeats certain words in his works to give them more emphasis. When he uses dialogues, they are also very short and direct. One of Hemingway’s idols and fellow writer Ezra Pound greatly influenced his style. He almost looked up to Ezra as a teacher and used many of his techniques but in his own way. He learned that a story should have a certain melody to it and that he could use the repetition of different words, sounds, and images to give the work a whole new meaning. This unconventional way of writing is one of the many reasons why Hemingway is praised worldwide. He can be called the “master of the reduction of narrative”. Although his descriptions are short they are very precise and straight to the point. He was very meticulous with his English language because he believed the British were not ones to be praised or ever copied. His many experiences with the war made him greatly pessimistic and therefore sometimes ironic in some of his work. He would transfer these feelings of disenchantment, reminiscence, and suffering into many of his stories. Hemingway steers clear of portraying most of the human emotions that are very deep and thoughtful. He goes for the more simple emotions that you would see in an everyday form. These might include eating, sleeping, drinking, meaningless sexual encounters and etc. The use of such meaningless