Ernest Miller Hemingway was one of the most famous and influential novelists and short story writers of the twentieth century. He was born on the 21st of July in 1899 to a doctor, Edmonds Hemingway, and a singer, Grace Hall Hemingway. He published about 15 books during his lifetime and created his own unique and highly recognizable prose style, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway still exerts a strong influence on modern writers today, such as Chuck Palahniuk, J.D. Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who have all stated they were affected in some way by his books. Hemingway was also an accomplished fisherman and outdoorsman with a huge appetite for drink, food, and life in general. But in 1961, he took his own life at his home in Ketchum, Idaho while suffering from numerous health problems and severe depression. Below are quotes taken from Hemingway’s books and letters, along with facts about his life.
Quote: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Fact: Hemingway wrote regularly for his high school newspaper, The Trapeze. He mainly wrote humorous articles using the writing style of Ring Lardner.
Quote: “All my life I have looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
Quote: “Courage is grace under pressure.”
Fact: In 1920, Hemingway moved to Toronto Canada, partly because of prohibition being declared in the United States.
Quote: “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
Quote: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away. There is rifle fire all night long. The rifles go tacrong, carong, craang, tacrong, and then a machine gun opens up. […] Then there is the incoming boom of a trench mortar shell and a burst of machine-gun fire. You lie and listen to it, and it is a great thing to be in a bed with your feet stretched out gradually warming the cold foot of the bed and not out there…”
Fact: Hemingway liked to think of writing in terms of competing with other authors living and dead. The one author he said he would never go up against was Leo Tolstoy.
Quote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Quote: “For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
Fact: Hemingway said the best rules for writing were those he received while working on the Kansas City Star newspaper. Here are the rules: “1. Use short sentences. 2. Use short first paragraphs. 3. Use vigorous English. 4. Be positive, not negative.”
Quote: “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.”
Quote: “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
Fact: During WWI, Hemingway drove an ambulance in Italy for the American Red Cross. Later a bomb exploded and he was seriously wounded. His novel, A Farewell to Arms, was based on his time in WWI.
Quote: “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
Quote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
Fact: Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea, won the Pulitzer Prize in literature in 1953.
Quote: “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
Quote from The Old Man and the Sea: “I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We are born lucky. Yes, we are born lucky.”
Fact: Hemingway’s picture appeared on a commemorative postage stamp in the United States in 1989 as a part of the Literary Arts series.
Quote: “If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.”
Quote: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
Fact: Hemingway wrote over 8,000 letters during his lifetime.
Quote from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”
Quote: “If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”
Fact: Hemingway’s father, sister, brother, and granddaughter all committed suicide.
Quote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
