Ernest Hemingway: His Life and Works

Paper Summary:

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), one of the most popular and influential American novelists of the twentieth century, enjoyed nearly as much fame as a hard-living, adventurous personality as he did as a major artist. The paper shows that his life and his art were intertwined in many ways, and biography plays an important role in understanding his work. The paper shows that a great deal can be learned about Hemingway's art by studying the ways in which his life was transformed in his fiction--the process that made his fiction works of art rather than autobiography. The paper discusses several of Hemingway's books, including "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms."

From the Paper:

"If the autobiographical element in the Nick Adams stories is fairly direct--and the character can be considered Hemingway's alter-ego without any difficulty--the story in the novel was even more directly taken from life. Yet Jake Barnes, the protagonist, is far more problematical as a stand-in for the author. In some ways the character's disgust with the 'lostness' of the other lost generation characters in the book and his pleasure in the art of the bullfighter reflected the real Hemingway. They were also the first fictional steps in the author's lifelong project of "orchestrat[ing] his own persona, a persona which continues to dominate both popular and critical evaluations" of the novels and stories (Clifford 172). Thus readings of the novel sometimes concentrate too heavily on this emerging public Hemingway."

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