He is without question one of the most courageous men I have ever known. Fear was a stranger to him.
— Colonel "Buck" Lanham
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 July 2, 1961) was an American author and Nobel Prize winner born in Oak Park, Illinois. Has written some of the most famous Prose Fiction in the English language. First 20th Century writer to get away with the word "fuck". Master of Beige Prose. Fought in World War I, covered the sequel. Wrestled lions. Flew airplanes. Caught big fish. Owned and loved a clowder of polydactyl cats. Made Mojitos and Daiquiris manly. Grandfather of actresses Mariel Hemingway and Margaux Hemingway. Shot himself. Shortly before his suicide, claimed to a friend that the FBI was monitoring him. He was right.
One of the most Memetic Badass writers in western literature (did you see the part about wrestling lions?). The Most Interesting Man in the World is pretty much an Expy of him.
Works:
- Novels and novellas
- The Torrents of Spring (1926)
- The Sun Also Rises (1926) (also published under the title Fiesta)
- 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)
- Islands in the Stream (1970) (published posthumously)
- The Garden of Eden (1986) (published posthumously)
- True at First Light (1999) (published posthumously)
- Non-fiction
- Death in the Afternoon (1932)
- Green Hills of Africa (1935)
- A Moveable Feast (1964) (published posthumously)
- By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967) (published posthumously) - a collection of 77 newspaper articles written between 1920 and 1956
- The Dangerous Summer (1985) (published posthumously)
- Other
- Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) - short stories and poetry
- In Our Time (1925) - short stories
- Men Without Women (1927) - short stories, including...
- "In Another Country"
- "Hills Like White Elephants"
- "The Killers"
- Winner Take Nothing (1933) - short stories, including...
- "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"
- "A Way You'll Never Be"
- "A Day's Wait"
- The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938) - anthology containing Hemingway's only play (The Fifth Column) and 49 short stories, including all of the ones from the above short story compilations and a few new ones like...
- "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
- "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (1961) - short stories, all of which had previously been published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (see above)
- 88 Poems (1979) (published posthumously) - poetry, including 47 previously unpublished poems (the rest having previously appeared in Three Stories and Ten Poems and various magazines)
Portrayals in Fiction
- The "Form and Void" arc of Cerebus the Aardvark has Cerebus and Jaka interacting with parodies of Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary. These are heavily based on Mary's diaries from their last safaris when Hemingway was in poor health.
- In Love and War (1996): He is played by Chris O'Donnell during WWI.
- Shortcut to Happiness (2007): Hemingway is a member of the Jury of the Damned sitting in judgment on Jabez Stone.
- Midnight in Paris (2011): Hemingway appears in a handful of scenes ... and totally steals the whole goddamn movie. Played by Corey Stoll.
- Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) Covers his relationship with his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn. Played by Clive Owen.
- Papa Hemingway In Cuba (2015) Covers his life in Cuba and his friendship with Denne Petticlerc. The first movie filmed in Cuba since the revolution.
- In the Timeline-191 series, he's an ambulance driver during the equivalent of World War I as in real history, but is wounded in the groin and left with severe damage. He only writes a single non-fiction book before killing himself, this time taking his girlfriend with him.
- He appears in the "Best Foot Forward" episode of Forever at a party that Henry once attended. Apparently, he once stole one of Henry's girlfriends.Ernest: This is Paris, Henry. You should be out, wandering these fair streets with a beautiful girl on your arm.
Henry: I did have a girl, Ernest, but she left me for a charming American novelist.
Ernest: Ah, yes, I seem to have forgotten her. Maybe you should, too. - In Kenan & Kel, Kenan gets inspired by his biography and tries to set life goals for himself to feel complete
- An episode of Celebrity Deathmatch has WWF Wrestler Mankind (voiced by himself) allowed to fight anyone he wishes to the death, including already dead people thanks to their Celebrity Deathmatch Timemachine. Mankind chooses to fight against and defeated Ernest Hemingway.
- HEMINGWAY WAS THE GREATEST
is an incredibly crude, muscial short based on the author. Giving exaggerated descriptions of his manly exploits, most of which involve fighting animals before fucking them and then hunting them, he's also credited as liberating France, eating a sheet of glass, cutting off and eating his finger on a whim, and being the greatest author ever.Hemingway! Hemingway!
His way is the only way, Hemingway!
The other authors can run away!
Drink and fuck and punch and write and hunt and fish and box and fight!
Hemingwaaaaaay! - Appears in a Cutaway Gag in Family Guy sitting in heaven alongside Brian, Vincent van Gogh, and Kurt Cobain, lamenting that they all seemed to have died before their time. He and his fellow artists relate the poetic nature of their deaths related to their artistic genius; Brian awkwardly admits he just found some chocolate in the garbage.
- Portrayed in Animaniacs as having just sworn to "never put pen to paper again" after suffering an intense writer's block. Then he meets the Warner siblings, who just want him to sign for a delivery, and by the end of the episode, he's become inspired to write again by adopting his famous Beige Prose.
Works by Hemingway with their own pages:
See also
- "Hemingway's Six-Word Story," almost certainly not created by Hemingway.
Other works by Hemingway contain examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: Happens to the film versions of "The Killers" — two so far, the second one infamously casting Ronald Reagan as the villain — where the movies try to delve into the mysterious motives of two hitmen and their target that the short story brilliantly refuses to answer.
- Always Someone Better: In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway kills a rhino — only to find that his friend Karl has killed a bigger one. Later, Hemingway kills a kudu — and once again, he finds that Karl has killed a bigger one.
- Author Avatar: Nick Adams, a recurring character in Hemingway's short stories.
- Beastly Bloodsports: So very much. Death in the Afternoon is the most famous book ever written about bullfighting. The Dangerous Summer is about the rivalry between two famous Spanish bullfighters (Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez) during the summer of 1959.
- Dying Dream: Harry's dream in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" about being put in a plane and flown towards said mountain.
- Elephant in the Living Room: "Hills Like White Elephants" follows a couple talking at a train station, with the man attempting to convince the woman to have an abortion. The actual nature of the operation he's pressing, however, and the reason for it, are conspicuously never mentioned.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Titles like Three Stories and Ten Poems and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.
- Footnote Fever: "A Natural History of the Dead" uses a footnote to further satirize the style of history while making a sardonic statement about the extinction of "humanists" in modern society.
- Garden of Eden: The Garden Of Eden, despite not featuring any Biblical characters, uses this motif to describe David and Catherine's marriage. While their honeymoon is initially idyllic, the cracks begin to show early on and the ending implies that they will stay separate, mirroring Adam and Eve's happiness in the Garden before everything went down.
- Gay Paree: A Moveable Feast established Paris as the place to be for interwar American artists.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Implied. "Hills Like White Elephants" is about a couple discussing whether or not the woman should have an abortion: he wants her to, she doesn't but eventually agrees, saying she's willing to always do anything he wants. Nearly the entire story is dialogue without mentions of tone, gestures, or thoughts, leaving the possibility for a lot of Alternative Character Interpretation (whether or not she's being angry or sarcastic at the end, for example).
- Great White Hunter: Robert Wilson in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".
- Manly Men Can Hunt: A central element of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". The wealthy Macomber takes his wife on a hunting trip and finds himself upstaged by the hunting guide, Robert Wilson. Macomber struggles to prove himself a competent hunter as his wife blatantly falls for the more confident and masculine Wilson: he eventually succeeds in shooting a buffalo, but shortly after he is shot by his own wife. Hemingway leaves it open whether this second shooting is accidental or intentional. Also deconstructed, as Robert Wilson isn't depicted as cool or noble, but a coldhearted bastard who doesn't even care when Francis is killed, and cruelly taunts his wife about it.
- Noodle Incident: The frozen corpse of a leopard that was found close to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, as mentioned at the start of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude". Probably metaphorical rather than literal, as the top of Kilimanjaro turns out to be the "final destination" in the protagonist's Dying Dream.
- Rule of Symbolism: In "Hills Like White Elephants", the couple's unwanted unborn child is implicitly compared to a white elephant. In ancient Thailand, it was customary for a king to give a white elephant to a courtier he was fed up with. Since white elephants were considered sacred, the courtier wouldn't be able to use it to do any work or anything useful, but they also couldn't give it away, so their only option was to keep it as a drain on their resources.
- Signature Style: The "iceberg theory": leave out everything you can. This is a very polarizing style of writing, with people usually either calling Hemingway a genius or a terrible writer.
- Beige Prose: Simple and straightforward prose.
- Show, Don't Tell: Vivid physical descriptions and serious research avoid the topic at hand. "Hills Like White Elephants" is an argument about an operation. "Big Two-Hearted River" depicts a man focusing exclusively on fishing.
- Subtext/
Fridge Brilliance: The actual point of the story is always left out. Sometimes the climax is too: "Out Of Season" doesn't include its own twist ending. "Hill's Like White Elephants" doesn't ever actually label its core conflict.
