Ernest Hemingway
3 books analyzed
Biography
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) drove ambulances for the Red Cross on the Italian front in 1918. He was severely wounded near Fossalta di Piave by a mortar shell and machine-gun fire — he was nineteen years old. While recovering in a Milan hospital, he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years his senior, who eventually broke off the relationship by letter. He carried shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life and Agnes's rejection for longer. He married four times, survived two plane crashes in Africa, won the Nobel Prize in 1954, and died by suicide in 1961. A Farewell to Arms was his second novel and the book that made him famous and wealthy at thirty.
Ernest Hemingway at a glance
Works
A Farewell to Arms
1929 · 332 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
Hemingway's most devastating love story — where war and biology conspire to destroy everything men pretend to control.
The Old Man and the Sea
1952 · 127 pages · ★★☆☆☆ Moderate
A 127-page novella about an old man catching a fish — and one of the most argued-about books in American literature.
The Sun Also Rises
1926 · 251 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
Hemingway's iceberg floats here first — the wounds are real but never named, and everything that matters is what nobody says.
Diction Across Works
spare-concrete
stripped-declarative
flat-declarative