17._READING_BOOKS

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

- was one of the best-known American writers

- he belonged to a group of writers, called “the lost generation”

- he was a man whose unique mastery of the art of writing influenced the style of an entire generation of writers

(it is an influence that persists today)

- he create a style of writing using - short, simple sentences

- frequent monologues

- compound sentences (souřadná souvětí)

- he did not comment actions and feelings which does not mean

- his books are full of description usually of a countryside

- in his works he concentrated on topical life events: birth, love, pain, violence, fight and death

- as for characters there are no good female character

- he created thy type of a “tough guy” = he himself or he would like to be

- his man is keen on typically male activities: war, fight, bullfight, fishing, hunting, food and drink

- most important for his character is - strong men don’t talk too much

- they don’t show pain

- they don’t give up

- the most appreciate is to be brave and honest

- his life:

- when the USA entered World War I, Hemingway tried to enlist in the army and he was finally accepted as

an ambulance driver of the Red Cross in Italy

- shortly before his 19th birthday, he was badly wounded and spent several weeks in a hospital in Milan ->

-> this experience provided material for his future novel A Farewell to Arms

- he returned to Chicago in 1919 and then went to Canada to work for the Toronto Star

- from 1921 to 1925 he lived in Europe (Paris) where he worked hard to become a writer

- in 1926 with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, his reputation as an excellent novel writer was established

- from 1921 to 1927 he also made a lots of trips to Africa (The Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro)

- later he published A Farewell to Arms

- at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, we worked as a correspondent

- out of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War came his longest novel For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls - the novel emphasizes the idea that a loss of liberty anywhere means the loss of

liberty everywhere

- it tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the International Brigades

fighting to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco

- after being ordered to work with guerrilla fighters to destroy a bridge, Jordan finds

falling in love with a young Spanish woman and clashing with the guerrilla leader over

the risks of their mission

- Ernest Hemingway received a Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the Nobel Prize

- he suffered from serious stomach ailment and in 1961 he committed suicide

- he also gathered materials for his play The Fifth Column

- when the war was ended, he settled in Cuba, where one story he heard from a fish man gave him the idea for his

short novel The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea

- his masterpiece

- the main character Santiago was an old Cuban fish man who used to go fishing with a boy called Manoli