Sunday 26 July 2015

ERNEST HEMINGWAY


When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway

The public's acquaintance with the personal life of Ernest Hemingway was perhaps greater than with any other modern novelist. He was well known as a sportsman and "bon vivant" ..He became a legendary figure, wrote John W. Aldridge, "a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post single-handed against fierce German attacks." 
Continue reading here.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous members of the "Lost Generation", the post-World War I generation of American writers who expatriated to Paris and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The phrase refers to a disillusioned generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. 




Now let's watch the movie based on Hemingway’s novel "A Farewell to Arms"  -  set against the backdrop of the Italian front during World War I, it is the story of an American Army volunteer who meets a British nurse on the eve of the big offensive in the Alps and they fall passionately in love. Torn apart, then reunited, they escape to Switzerland to await the birth of their child …


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