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
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Letters
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing, Art
The things of the night cannot be explained in the day.
—Ernest Hemingway
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine, One liners
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
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Exaggeration
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
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they’re all camp followers.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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: Morality, Simple Living, Simplicity, Morals
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Words
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Criticism, Critics
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Creativity
As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Procrastination, Inaction, Getting Going
In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wine
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
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Weapon
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
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
Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Letters
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. – Hemingway, Ernest
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Storytelling
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Luck
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Humor
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Wealth, Riches
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
—Ernest Hemingway
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: Literature, Criticism
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
—Ernest Hemingway
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Literature, Books
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