Ernest Hemingway, a famous author and journalist, was born in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His father was a doctor; his mother, a musician. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall. As a young man, he was interested in writing; he wrote for and edited his high school newspaper, as well as the high school yearbook. Upon graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper briefly, but in that short time, he learned the writing style that would shape nearly all of his future work.
As an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded and spent several months in the hospital. While there, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. They planned to marry; however, she became engaged to an Italian officer instead. This experience devastated Hemingway, and Agnes became the basis for the female characters in his subsequent short stories “A Very Short Story” (1925) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), as well as the famous novel “A Farewell To Arms” (1929). This would also start a pattern Ernest would repeat for the rest of his life – leaving women before they had the chance to leave him first.
Ernest Hemingway began work as a journalist upon moving to Paris in the early 1920s, but he still found time to write. He was at his most prolific in the 20s and 30s. His first short story collection, aptly titled “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” was published in 1923. His next short story collection, “In Our Time,” published in 1925, was the formal introduction of the vaunted Hemingway style to the rest of the world and considered one of the most important works of 20th-century prose. He would then go on to write some of the most famous works of the 20th century, including “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Ernest Hemingway lived most of his later years in Idaho. He began to suffer from paranoia, believing the FBI was aggressively monitoring him. In November of 1960, he began frequent trips to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for electroconvulsive therapy – colloquially known as “shock treatments.” He had his final treatment on June 30, 1961. Two days later, on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He was a few weeks short of his 62nd birthday. This wound up being a recurring trend in his family; his father, as well as his brother and sister, also died by committing suicide. The legend of Hemingway looms large, and his writing style is so unique that it left a legacy in the literature that will endure forever.
Here's a list of the major works of Ernest Hemingway.
Novels/Novella- The Torrents of Spring (1925)
- The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- To Have and Have Not(1937)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
- Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
- Islands in the Stream (1970)
- The Garden of Eden (1986)
Nonfiction- Death in the Afternoon (1932)
- Green Hills of Africa (1935)
- The Dangerous Summer (1960)
- A Moveable Feast (1964)
Short Story Collections- Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
- In Our Time (1925)
- Men Without Women (1927)
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1932)
- Winner Take Nothing (1933)
- The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
- The Essential Hemingway (1947)
- The Hemingway Reader (1953)
- The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
Read more about E.Hemingway:
Go to these links to get ready for our discussion:
Cat in the Rain
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Read the opening paragraph of the story closely and discuss how it helps to set the tone of the story and how it provides the readers with the theme(s) of the story. For example: Why are there only two Americans stopping at the hotel? What do “the public garden” and “the war monument stand” for in the story? What is the importance of the emphasis on the weather in the opening paragraph? What is the symbolic value of the artists? What is the reason for the narrator’s emphasis on the emptiness of the square?
2. What is the significance of the rain in the story?
3. Identify what the female protagonist is called in the whole story and discuss in what ways this could be significant.
4. Why does the narrator describe the cat as “crouched under one of the dripping green tables”?
5. Make a comparison between George and the hotel keeper. What is the function of each of these characters in the story?
6. What could be the metaphorical value of the maid’s question to the wife: “Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signoria?” (“Have you lost something, Madam?”)
7. Why does the hotel keeper make the American wife “feel very small and at the same time really important”?
8. Discuss the references to the wife’s hair: Why does George like his wife’s hair “the way it is”? Why does the wife want to “make a big knot at the back”?
9. There are two cats in the story. What does each of them symbolize? Why does the wife want a kitty to sit on her lap and purr?
10. Extension Activity:
Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”: Hemingway views his writing style as “fashioned on the “principle of the iceberg,” for “seven-eights of it [is] underwater for every part that shows” (cited in Thomas Strychacz, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson (Ed.), p. 59). In other words, as Hemingway said, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (cited in Elizabeth Dewberry, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson, Ed., p. 23)
Discuss Hemingway’s metaphor of “iceberg” in relation to his short story “Cat in the Rain”.
Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”: Hemingway views his writing style as “fashioned on the “principle of the iceberg,” for “seven-eights of it [is] underwater for every part that shows” (cited in Thomas Strychacz, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson (Ed.), p. 59). In other words, as Hemingway said, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (cited in Elizabeth Dewberry, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson, Ed., p. 23)
Discuss Hemingway’s metaphor of “iceberg” in relation to his short story “Cat in the Rain”.
The Killers
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
- Author and critic Robert Penn Warren raised this question: "To whom does ‘The Killers’ belong?" and concluded that the answer was "Nick Adams." Is he right? Who and what is this story really about?
- Which character does the reader most identify with?
- Identify how Sam, George and Nick react when they find out the killers are after Ole Andreson. Then discuss what these reactions reveal about these three characters.
- Do we believe Nick’s claim at the end of the story that he’s going to get out of town? Does this seem like an extreme reaction on his part? Does George’s final comment that he’d "better not think about it" seem likely to change Nick’s resolve to leave?
- Why do you think Ole Anderson refuses to take action?
- We don’t ever see Ole’s death. What effect does this have on the story? Do we hold out hope that he might live, or take it for granted that the killers will find and whack him, as they say?
- Comment on the physical description of the two killers: why are they depicted as identical and clownish?
- Did you notice all the repetition of the same phrases and words in the story’s dialogue? ("I don’t know," "All right," "bright boy," etc.) What purpose does this serve thematically? Structurally? Does it affect the style or tone of the story? How?
- What message(s) does the story convey as far as the nature of the world is concerned?
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