“Grace Under Pressure”

 Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois  “A place of wide lawns and narrow minds”

 He spent his summers on a lake in upper Michigan

 When he was 25 years old, he went to World War One in Italy and served in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps  One night in July 1918 he was hit by a trench mortar shell.  228 pieces of shrapnel hit his body.

 He recuperated in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse. She was the inspiration for Catherine Barkley

 Unhappy back home, he went to Paris where he worked as a reporter and freelance writer.  Here he honed his literary skills and was part of a group of artists called “The Lost Generation”

 His terse, straightforward style influenced every succeeding generation of writers.  He called this writing on the “principle of the iceberg”

 “For every one-eighth of it that you see above water, there is seven-eighths of it submerged.”

 He became famous overnight with the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), about the lost generation.  He followed that up with A Farewell to Arms (1929), also a bestseller.

 By 1930 his public image was world famous.  He became fascinated by bullfighting in Spain and published a nonfiction book about it, Death in the Afternoon.  He also became interested in big- game hunting, and went on safaris in Africa.  He wrote a book about that too, called Green Hills of Africa.  Ironically, he was sick much of his life had bad eyesight, and was accident-prone

 In the 1940s he was in two separate plane crashes in Africa. In the second one, newspaper headlines reported he had died.

 After writing nonfiction in the 1930s, he returned to fiction with For Whom the Bell Tolls in  Hemingway sympathized with, and fought with, the left-leaning Republicans against the fascist regime.  Citadel graduate Jim Rigney (aka “Robert Jordan”) took his pen name from this character.  He called Spain “the country I love the most” and returned there frequently

 He was larger than life, and hard to live with.  He was married 4 times, and each time he valued work more than family.  He would tolerate no wife who tried to overshadow him.  He had 3 sons, one of whom is still living.

 He wrote his most famous books in Key West and Cuba.  Both houses there are now museums.  He loved being on the water and sport fishing. He competed in fishing and boxing tournaments.

 During World War II, he reported on the Normandy invasion from inside the amphibious landing craft.  He marched into Paris on the day it was liberated, and “took command” of the bar at the Ritz Hotel

 In Cuba he had a yacht, the Pilar, captained by a fisherman named Gregorio Fuentes.  In the 1950s, critics thought Hemingway was finished, but Fuentes inspired him to write The Old Man and the Sea.  When it first appeared in Life magazine, the story sold out the entire issue.

 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in  Throughout his life had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar syndrome.  This was probably brought on by trauma from his war wound.  He grew depressed, and had to undergo electroshock therapy.

 Instead of helping him, this made his condition even worse.  Clinically depressed, he committed suicide in  After he died, five more books he had completed but not published, were brought out.

 He created a new style of writing that predominates today.  He regarded writing as a noble calling, almost religious in nature.  He was dedicated to his craft, and he worked hard at it.  He hated phonies, always lived among “ordinary” people, and thought the literary world was stuffy and artificial.

 He created a new kind of hero, who lives by a code.  He thought the greatest virtue in one’s life was living with “grace under pressure.”  That philosophy defines Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms.