Ernest Hemingway 厄内斯特 海明威.doc

Ernest Hemingway 厄内斯特 海明威 （1899-1961）Ernest Hemingway was a novelist and short story writer who became one of the best-known American authors of the 20th century. His lean, economical style has been widely copied by other writers, and his stories of courage in the face of tragedy are re-read by each generation. His LifeHemingway was born in a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor who like to hunt and fish in his spare time. His mother was an artist. Young Hemingway was an outstanding student at high school, and he already wrote some short stories at that age, in which he rebelled against the prudery（过分拘谨，假正经this is no time for prudery.）and conformity of his respectable parents. Instead of attending university, Hemingway worked briefly as a journalist, but he really wanted to take part in the First World War. When the U.S. Army rejected him because of one bad eye (bad vision), he volunteered first as an ambulance driver in France, and then as a soldier in the Italian infantry. He was badly wounded at the age of eighteen. When he lay in an Italian hospital, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, but she refused his proposal of marriage. He returned to Chicago to complete his recovery, and there he met and married his first wife. As soon as he was well, they sailed to France, where Hemingway worked in Paris as a correspondent for a Canadian newspaper, and as an assistant for an American literary magazine. But his main purpose was to write his own stories. He became a close friend of Gertrude Stain and Ezra Pound, who helped him to develop his characteristic style; Sherwood Anderson also helped him at the start. He read systematically in the great works of Russian, French and American literature, and he associated with other young expatiate writers in Gertrude Steins circle, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.E. Cummings. His wife bore a son, but they were divorced soon afterwards, and Hemingway married again. During his years in Paris, Hemingway became a master of short fiction. In 1926, his full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises, met with great success. A second novel, A Farewell to Arms, firmly established his reputation in 1929. Hemingways own adventurous life provided much raw material for his strongly masculine stories. During the 1930s he wrote less because a large part of his time was spent in deep-see fishing near Cuba, where he eventually went to live, big game hunting in Africa, or following bullfights in Spain. In 1937 he took part in the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, strongly supporting the losing Republican side against the Fascist forces of Franco. His experiences provided material for one of his best novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls. While he was in Spain he met and fell in love with a writer and journalist whom he married, after divorcing his second fife. They traveled together to China, as journalists, to report on the Japanese invasion, and then returned to Cuba. At first, Hemingway created an organization to report on German spies in Cuba, and German submarines off the Cuba coast, only 40 miles from the U.S.A. However, this work was not close enough to the center of the war from Hemingway, so he went to London as a journalist. He flew on several missions with the Royal Air Force, into the heart of battle. He crossed the English Channel with the American forces to report on the invasion of France, and he was present at the liberation of Paris. After the war, he returned to Cuba, divorced his third wife, and married a journalist whom he had met in London. She stayed with him for the rest of his life. Together they continued to have dangerous adventures (they were injured in two plane crashes in Africa). In 1952, Hemingway published his last successful novel, The Old Man And The Sea. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That year he was 53 years old The Cuban Revolution of 1960 drove forefingers out of Cuba. Hemingway went to live in Idaho, a wild part of the U.S.A. in the Rocky Mountains. He became deeply depressed and so tormented by fears and anxieties that he had to enter a famous hospital for eclectic shock treatments. Two days after retuning to Idaho, he committed suicide by shooting himself with his hunting gun. Hemingway was a man of many contradictions. He was both extremely generous and extremely selfish. He loved life, yet he continually pondered about death. His life was bold and courageous, yet his courage deserted him in the end. His point of View Hemingways point of view was shaped by his experience as a young man in the First World War, and his near death on the battlefield. Many of his stories dealt with war or injury, and nearly all of them examined the nature of courage. By living through the impersonal violence of the war, by suffering the violent accident of his wound, he felt that he had been cut off form the security of his own past life and from all his bold beliefs and assumptions about life. In a parallel way, he felt that the First World War had broken Americas culture and traditions, and separated it from its roots. Hemingway looked at his world in honest, stark, postwar terms（无修饰的，朴实无华，一丝不挂，天然的，these islands have a stark beauty. ）. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way. He gave no literary explanations, and no conventional “happy endings” to his stories. In trying to understand the nature of injury and violent death and the courage needed to face them, Hemmingway became a knowledgeable spectator of Spanish bull fighting. Many of his stories contained episodes in the bullring. Risk, danger, grace, skill and death were always present in this traditional, ritualistic sport of Spain. His own love of big game hunting undoubtedly stemmed from his curiosity about these things. In the African jungles, he could test his own courage and skill against an impersonal, violent enemy, the wild beast, while avoiding the random devastation of modern war. For many years, Hemingway condemned war as purposeless slaughter. His attitude changed when he took part in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). There he found that in opposition to Fascism was a cause worth fighting for. He found a great unity of spirit among his Republican comrades. He saw a significant reason for violence and death outside the bullring. Hemingways exploration of courage in his literature took many forms. He wrote about courage and cowardice in battle, where he defined courage as “an instinctive movement toward or away from the center of violence, with self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed motives.” He denied the romantic idea that courage was a noble emotion which could govern a mans action or prepare him to perform a brave act. 勇气是一种高尚的情感，它控制人的行为，使他能够做出勇敢的行动。Hemingway also wrote about the courage with which men face the tragedies of life that can never be remedied. One of the short stories to be read for this course, “In Another Country”, deals with the courage of an old soldier who must face permanent injury and the death of his young wife. The other, “A Clean Well-lighted Place”, tells of the courage needed by old men to face intolerable loneliness. His literary StyleHemingways writing may be classified as belonging to the school of naturalism. Naturalism is a theory in literature emphasizing scientific observation of life without idealism or avoidance of the ugly. The predecessor in American literature whose writing he admired the most was Stephen Crane (1871-1900). Hemingway also studied mark Twains works and followed his example in using colloquialisms. Hemingway found that his most difficult task was: “how to put down what really happened in action: what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced the real things, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion.” 如何把正在发生的事写下来：究竟是什么产生了你所体验到的那种情绪，实实在在发生的事情，造成你体验到那种情绪的事情，或事实演进的顺序。 In this effort he differed markedly from Theodore Dreiser, another American naturalistic writer (1871-1945). Dreiser would describe a state of mind and let the reader infer the action which proceeded from it. Hemingway wanted to describe the action so vividly that the reader could infer the state of mind. Later, Hemingway wrote: “A writers problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”With the help of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, he learned simplicity and economy of expression as a way to reach his goal. His use of short, uncomplicated, active sentences, with very few adjectives, became his recognizable style and many other writers imitated it. Hemingway strove for ever greater precision and a minimal use of words in order to immerse his readers in a “continuous present.” More words about his style (Tongming) Hemingways style is noted for its simplicity. In diction, he focuses on nou