Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. At the height of his popularity, this 1954 Nobel laureate was acknowledged as the most celebrated literary stylists of the 20th century.
Hemmingway’s life and literary career were contentious from the outset. The Hemingway machismo persona included hard-drinking, a confrontational disposition, and a penchant for bullfights, prizefights, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing.
Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. His father, a doctor, introduced Hemingway to the rituals of hunting and fishing. His mother was religious and musical. Much of Hemingway’s later creativity was inspired by reminiscences of vacation trips to northern Michigan, the setting of some of his most extraordinary stories.
After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway became a journalist in Paris, where he came into contact with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and other writers. He later served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Hemingway’s principal literary theme is war—as a personal and symbolic experience, moral condition, and a steady-state of the human spirit. His notable works include The Sun Also Rises (1926,) A Farewell to Arms (1929,) For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940,) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952; Pulitzer, 1953.) His collections of stories include Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933.)
During his life, Hemingway was a celebrity whose every move was reported in the newspapers and magazines of his day. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Idaho’s Sun Valley, word of his death made front-page news around the world. A number of his significant works, including A Moveable Feast (1964,) The Nick Adams Stories (1972,) and The Dangerous Summer (1985,) were published after his death.
Most of Hemingway’s novels and many of his short stories have been made into feature films. He has inspired numerous full-length biographies, countless personal remembrances by family and friends, and many books of criticism.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ernest Hemingway
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Writing, Literature
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Heaven
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Intelligence
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Simple Living, Morality, Morals, Simplicity
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Cats
I’ve seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won’t stink.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Patriotism
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Reading, Books
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Survival
The bombers … move W
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Style
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
—Ernest Hemingway
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
—Ernest Hemingway
All thinking men are atheists.
—Ernest Hemingway
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Invention
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, “What will you have, sir?” And I said, “A glass of hemlock.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Marriage
Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books
Courage is grace under pressure.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Courage, Bravery
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
—Ernest Hemingway
The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Twentieth Century
The things of the night cannot be explained in the day.
—Ernest Hemingway
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Economics, Economy
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Comedy
If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Contentment
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Authors & Writing, Art, Writers
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Simplicity
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat—no matter who killed the meat for him.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Journalism
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Literature, Books
Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Life and Living
You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Criticism, Literature
Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Retirement
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Hunting
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: War
There is no friend as loyal as a book
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Friendship
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Cities, City Life
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
—Ernest Hemingway
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Corruption
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Sports
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
Helen Keller American Author
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
James Agee American Man of Letters
Isaac Bashevis Singer Polish-born American Children’s Books Writer
Washington Irving American Author
Jane Addams American Social Reformer
Robert W. Service Scottish Poet
William Faulkner American Novelist
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist