聊城大学外国语学院美国文学史与选读课件 Lecture19.pptVIP

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Literary Position of Hemingway The 6th Nobel Prize winner (1954) in American literary history The spokesman of the lost generation One of the most important writers in modernist American literature Life of Ernest Hemingway born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 His father, Ernest Miller, was a doctor and also an avid hunter and fisherman. Both the father and the son kill themselves by gun a dominant artist mother Hemingway feels shameful of Quitting school after graduation from high school Life of Ernest Hemingway at age 17 taking a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. The newspaper style he has to follow in this profession lay foundation for his later literary style. The boss of this newspaper forbids his men to use any flowery, arrogant, exaggerated adjectives and adverbs in their report. Verb is favored, so is short sentences, short first paragraphs. Hemingway admits he learns a lot from this. And this requirement shapes his life-long prose style. Life of Ernest Hemingway rejected while wanting to fight in WWI due to an eye injury, but traveling overseas as a Red Cross ambulance driver; wounded in Italy during his duties with the Red Cross at 19; the first wounded American during this war; welcome home as a hero in Toronto working as a reporter for the Toronto Star; dissatisfied and moving to Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Star . in Paris, taken under the wing of fellow Americans Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound under whose influence Hemingway focused his attention on creative writing rather than reporting. Life of Ernest Hemingway Like Fitzgerald, E.E. Cummings, trying to reform literature, whom Stein labels them as “the lost generation” To be lost means: Cut off from their country, form continuity caused by the death of their friends in the war, the prevailing greed, the cruelty of the age. In literature, trying a spare, tight, reportorial prose style, concise in imagery, and dramatic in tone Life of Ernest Hem