Ernest Hemingway

Bio:
Ernest Hemingway was born in Cicero, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. He was a very outdoorsy person, and spent a lot of time hunting and fishing in his northern Michigan cabin. Hemingway wrote for his High School's news paper and he fell in love with journalism; after graduating he went on to work for the Kansas City Star newspaper. Soon after Hemingway joined the efforts overseas during WWI; he was not part of the military but served as an ambulance driver. As an ambulance driver he was injured and was taken out of the action. It was in Italy he met his first love, who soon broke relations with him for another man. Heartbroken, Hemingway came back to the States and continued to work for the Star, and he also got married to his first wife. Later he visited Paris, and met Gertrude Stein, who was his writing mentor, and met many other famous "Silent Generation" artists, including close friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. With a long writing career, and much travels, he landed back in the U.S. and was a news correspondent and covered WWII and the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway had won the Noble Peace Prize in Literature in 1954, but with all this fame he began to suffer more and more with his injured body and depression. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.



Famous Works:
-A Farewell to Arms
-The Sun Also Rises
-The Old Man and the Sea
-To Have and Have Not
-The Nick Adams Stories
-For Whom the Bell Tolls



Analysis:
I decided to analyze Ernest Hemingway's short story "Old Man at the Bridge", a story about the Spanish Civil War. The story is a conversation between a fascist Spanish solider and a tired old man leaving his town from the invading army. The old man explains to the solider that he has no family, just his animals, and the solider tries his best to console the old man about leaving his animals, in the hopes that the old man gets up and leaves. This story is about the hardships we go through during times of conflict, especially war time. The old man who has no family still cares about his pigeons, cat, and 2 goats, shows the caring nature we have to not let down the ones we love. The solider consoling the man shows how we all aren't enemies no matter what is going on politically, and that the solider understands the old man's sacrifices, because we all need to make sacrifices during war. Hemingway was an expert when it comes to writing about war, he has been in so many that he understands the nature of it, and captures it beautifully in his writing of this short story.



Miscellaneous:

-Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, as did his grandfather, father, sister, brother, and granddaughter

-Ernest was charged with war crimes under the Geneva Convention when he took command and led a group of French militia into battle against the Nazis

-There's an Ernest Hemingway lookalike society that holds yearly contests.