美国文学

外国语学院 英语09级五班 罗丹 20096834

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as well as the veterans of World War One later known as \"the Lost Generation\as described a disillusioned post-war generation characterized by lost values, list beliefs in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise(1920) when he writes of a generation that found all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. Lost Generation usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald and to a lesser extent T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hemingway used the phrase”You are a lost generation” as the epigraph to his first novel The Sun Also Rises(1926).

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899, Hemingway trained as a reporter in Kansas City.Thereafter he began to lead the sort of active and adventurous life that is so often the subject of his fiction. During the First World War he served in France and Italy, suffering serious injuries. In 1922 he returned to Europe as a journalist and mixed in the literary circle in Paris led by Gertrude Stein. This society formed the background of his first major novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. For his next important work, A Farewell to Arms(1929), he turned to his war experiences in Italy. During this period he also wrote a number of short stories. In 1937 he took part in the Spanish Civil War. This provided material for one of his best novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The decade following this novel was one of silence. Then in 1952 his last successful work of fiction, The Old Man and the Seaappeared. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide in 1961.

Hemingway’s point of view was shaped by his experience as a young man in the First World War, and his near death on the battle field. Many of his stories dealt with war or injury, and nearly all of them examined the nature of courage. His exploration of courage took many forms. He wrote about courage as “an instinctive movement toward or away from the center of violence, with self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed motives.” He could govern a man’s action or prepare him to perform a brave act..He also wrote about the courage with which men face the tragedies of life that can never be remedied. His typical hero is one who, wounded but strong, enjoys the pleasure of life (sex, alcohol,sport) in face of ruin and death and maintains,through some notion of a code, an ideal of himeself. His short story “In Another Country” deals with the courage of an old soldier who must face permanent injury and the death of his young wife.

Under the influence of Mark Twain and with the help of Gertrude Stein , and Ezra Pound, Hemingway developed a new colloquial style characterized by directness, freshness, simplicity, and apparent naturalness. Hemingway always managed to choose words concrete, specific, common, casual and conversational, and employ them often in a syntax of short, simple sentence, which are orderly and patterned ,conversational, and sometimes ungrammatical. But his style is deliberate and polished and never natural as it seems to be, and its simplicity can be disastrously deceptive, as it is highly suggestive and connotative and capable of offering layers of under-currents of meaning.

The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 and was one of Hemingway's most successful works which confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a huge part in his

winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it tells about an old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, who struggles for three days for a great marlinfound only in the deep where few men venture and who finally catches it only to see it devoured by sharks. Santiago’s deep loneliness, his venture into the unknown,forbidden sea, and his struggle with the great marlin is the symbol of man’s loneliness, pride, and struggle against nature. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic thene of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. He is brave enough to go far out and face the perilous nature alone. Experiencing physical and emotional pain, he never stops fighting. He is perseverant and he keeps fighting for his dignity. Santiago is confident and never doubts that he is a good fisherman. The respect he show to others let him sense the harmony of the world he lived in.

I think there is a close relationship between Santiago’s character and Hemingway’s. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway himself. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was fond of him and sang high praise of him.. They both form a perseverant chatacter in their hard life and they are both sensitive because of the lonely life they lead. Just as Hemingway could not accept that fact, neither could his character:Santiago. In fact, Hemingway utilized his life to show that he was an unconquerable”old lion”.