The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World War I years. Speaking to Ernest Hemingway, Stain said, "you are all a lost generation." The term stuck and the mystique surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. There were many literary artists involved in the groups known as the Lost Generation. The three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others usually included among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Waldo Pierce, Sylvia Beach, Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Sample members of the Lost Generation include the following: Elsa Maxwell Damon Runyon Sinclair Lewis, George Patton, Fatty Arbuckle, Irving Berlin, Walter Lippmann, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Humphrey Bogart, George Burns, Dorothy Parker, More generally, the term is being used for the generation of young people coming of age in the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the generation is sometimes known as the World War I Generation or the Roaring 20s Generation. In Europe they are most often known as the Generation of 1914, named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are called the Génération au Feu, the Generation of Fire. William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations list this generation’s birth years as 1883 to 1900. Their typical grandparents were the Gilded Generation; their parents were the Progressive Generation and Missionary Generation. Their children were the G.I. Generation and Silent Generation; their typical grandchildren were Baby boomers.
Traits
The "Lost Generation" were said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders. Like most attempts to pigeon-hole entire generations, this over-generalisation is true for some individuals of the generation and not true of others. It was fairly common among members of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the breadth of European work?leading many members to spend large amounts of time in Europe?and/or that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered. Nevertheless, this selfsame period saw an explosion in American literature and art, which is now often considered to include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers. This generation also produced the first flowering of jazz music, arguably the first distinctly American art form.
The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence in 20th century literature. Their innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and paved the way for subsequent generations of writers. Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation’s leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in the novel. John Dos Passos had also seen the brutality of the war and questioned the meaning of contemporary life. His novel Manhatten Transfer reveals the extent of his pessimism as he indicated the hopeless futility of life in an American city. F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age. AL
His dominant influences were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896. His first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen. During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, he wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humour magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, ?The Romantic Egotist?. He fell in love with a Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as ?a quest novel,? This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.
In 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald?s best story market, and he was regarded as a ?Post writer.? His early commercial stories about young love introduced a fresh character: the independent, determined young American woman who appeared in ?The Offshore Pirate? and ?Bernice Bobs Her Hair.? Fitzgerald?s more ambitious stories, such as ?May Day? and ?The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,? were published in The Smart Set, which had a small circulation.
The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavoured to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work. He wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Fitzgeralds expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable. They moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. The distractions New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his third novel. During this time his drinking increased. He was an alcoholic, but he wrote sober.
Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald?s clear, lyrical, colourful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. The chief theme of Fitzgerald?s work is aspiration, the idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: ?It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,? he wrote in ?Echoes of the Jazz Age.? Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in1924 . He wrote The Great Gatsby in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda?s involvement with a French naval aviator. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald?s technique, utilising a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald?s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.
In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway, then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle with whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway?s personality and genius. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled ?The Boy Who Killed His Mother,? ?Our Type,? and ?The World?s Fair.?
Fitzgerald?s peak story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from 160 magazine stories. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances. The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of 1931. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931.
In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress. Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1934, his most ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set in France during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.
The 1936-1937 period is known as ?the crack-up? from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina. Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting Three Comrades (1938), and his contract was renewed for a year. The $91,000 he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late Depression years; but although Fitzgerald paid off most of his debts, he was unable to save. Fitzgerald worked as a freelance scriptwriter and wrote short-short stories for Esquire. He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham?s apartment on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in 1948. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrection ?revival? does not properly describe the process occurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had achieved a secure place among America?s enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.
John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He is best remembered for THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic. The impact of the book has been compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Steinbeck’s epic about the migration of the Joad family, driven from its bit of land in Oklahoma to California, provoked a wide debate about the hard lot of migrant labourers, and helped to put an agricultural reform into effect. He was born in Salinas, California. His native region of Monterey Bay was later the setting for most of his fiction. From his mother, a teacher, Steinbeck learned to love books. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree – he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications. After spending a short time as a labourer and reporter in New York City for the American. When he was as a watchman of a house in the High Sierra, Steinbeck wrote his first book, CUP OF GOLD (1929). It failed to earn back the $250 the publisher had given him in an advance.
In Pacific Grove in the early 1930s, Steinbeck met Edward Ricketts. He was a marine biologist, whose views on the interdependence of all life deeply influenced Steinbeck’s thinking. THE SEA OF CORTEZ (1941) resulted from an expedition in the Gulf of California he made with Ricketts. In the novel TO A GOD UNKNOWN (1933) Steinbeck mingled Ricketts’ ideas with Jungian concepts and themes. The novel depicts a farmer, Joseph Wayne, who receives a blessing from his pioneer father, John Wayne, and goes to build himself a new farm in a distant valley. Joseph develops his own beliefs of death and life, and to bring an end to a drought, he sacrifices himself on a stone, becoming "earth and rain". Steinbeck did not want to explain his story too much and he knew beforehand that the book would not find readers. Steinbeck’s first three novels went unnoticed, but in 1935 appeared his humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans, TORTILLA FLAT, which brought him wider recognition. However, the theme of the book – the story of King Arthur and the forming of the Round Table – remained well hidden from the critics. IN DUBIOUS BATTLE (1936) was a strike novel set in the California apple country. The strike of nine hundred migratory workers is led by Jim Nolan, devoted to his cause. Later Steinbeck developed his observer’s personality with changes in such works as CANNERY ROW (1945), which returned to the world of Tortilla Flat. The novel was an account of the adventures and misadventures of workers in a California cannery and their friends. Its sequel, SWEET THURSDAY, appeared in 1954. In 1937 appeared THE RED PONY, which is among his finest works. The events take place on the Tiflin ranch in the Salinas Valley, California. The first two sections of the story sequence, "The Gift" and "The Great Mountains", were published in the North American Review in 1933, and the third section, "The Promise," did not appear in Harpers until 1937. A movie version, for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay, was made in 1949. Among Steinbeck’s other film scripts is The Pearl, the story for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat (1944), and script for Viva Zapata! (1952).
OF MICE AND MEN (1937), a story of shattered dreams, became Steinbeck’s first big success. Steinbeck adapted it also into a three-act play, which was produced in 1937. George Milton and Lennia Small, two itinerant ranchhands, dream of one day owning a small farm. George acts as a father figure to Lennie, who is large and simpleminded. Lennie loves all that is soft, but his immense physical strength is a source of troubles and George is needed to calm him. The two friends find work from a farm and start saving money for their future. Annoyed by the bullying foreman of the ranch, Lenny breaks the foreman’s arm, but also wakes the interest of the ranch owner’s flirtatious daughter-in-law. Lenny accidentally kills her and escapes into the hiding place, that he and George have agreed to use, if they get into difficulties. George hurries after Lenny and shoots him before he is captured by a vengeful mob but at the same time he loses his own hopes and dreams of better future.
For The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck travelled around California migrant camps in 1936. When the book appeared, it was attacked by US Congressman Lyle Boren who characterized it as "a lie, a black, infernal creation of twisted, distorted mind". Later, when Steinbeck received his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called it simply "an epic chronicle." The Exodus story of Okies on their way to an uncertain future in California, ends with a scene in which Rose of Sharon, who has just delivered a stillborn child, suckles a starving man with her breast.
John Ford’s film version from 1940, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, dismissed this ending – the final images optimistically celebrate President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Steinbeck himself was skeptical of Hollywood’s faithfulness to his material.
Fleeing publicity followed by the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico in 1940 to film the documentary Forgotten Village. During WW II, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Great Britain and the Mediterranean area. He wrote such government propaganda as the novel THE MOON IS DOWN (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis. The film version of the book, starring Henry Travers, Cedric Hardwicke, and Lee J. Cobb, was shot on the set of How Green Was My Valley (1941), which depicted a Welsh mining village. "Free men cannot start a war,"
Steinbeck’s postwar works include THE PEARL (1947), a symbolic tale of a Mexican Indian pearl diver Kino. He finds a valuable pearl which changes his life, but not in the way he did expect. Kino sees the pearl as his opportunity to better life. When the townsfolk of La Paz learn of Kino’s treasury, he is soon surrounded by a greedy priest, doctor, and businessmen. Kino’s family suffers series of disasters and finally he throws the pearl back into ocean. Thereafter his tragedy is legendary in the town. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL (1948) was an account of the author’s journey to the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa. Steinbeck’s idea was to describe the country without prejudices, but he could not move freely, he could not speak Russian, and the Soviet hosts took care that there were more than enough vodka, champagne, caviar, chickens, honey, tomatoes, kebabs, and watermelons on their guest’s table.
The director Elia Kazan met Steinbeck when the author had separated from Gwyn and was drinking heavily. Their most famous film project, East of Eden, covered the last part of the book. James Dean made his debut in the film. Kazan originally wanted Marlon Brando to play the role of Cal. Dean received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. EAST OF EDEN (1952), Steinbeck’s long family novel, is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. In the centre of the saga, based partly on the story of Cain and Abel, is two families of settlers, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose history reflect the formation of the United States when "the Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously…" The second half of the book focus on the lives of the twins, Aron and Caleb, and their conflict. Between them is Cathy, tiny, pretty, but an adulteress and murderess.
His writing process Steinbeck recorded minutely in JOURNAL OF A NOVEL (1969). In his lifetime, Steinbeck wrote thousands of letters, sometimes several a day. He published in 1962 TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY IN SEARCH OF AMERICA. His son John wrote in his memoir that Steinbeck was too shy to talk to any of the people in the book. THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (1961), set in contemporary America, was Steinbeck’s last major novel. It continued his exploration of the moral dilemmas involved in being fully human. The book was not well received, and critics considered him an exhausted. Not even the Nobel Prize changed opinions. The New York Times asked in an editorial, whether the prize committee might not have made a better choice. Steinbeck took this public humiliation hard. In later years he did much special reporting abroad, dividing his time between New York and California. He went to Vietnam to report on the war, and the New York Post attacked him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck died of heart attack in New York in 1968. In the posthumously published THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS (1976), Steinbeck turned his back on contemporary subjects and brought to life the Arthurian world with its ancient codes of honour. Steinbeck started the work with enthusiasm but never finished it.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
William Cuthbert Faulkner aspired to greatness, even as a small child, when he listened to tales and legends from his distinguished family?s past. William was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but the family soon moved to Oxford.
In June 1918, Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force of Canada. After dropping out of the university in 1921, Faulkner took a brief job in a New York bookstore; there he met the future wife of Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Prall. His first book of poetry, The Marble Faun (1924), continued his work in the decadent/neo-romantic vein.
In Anderson?s literary circle Faulkner became acquainted with Freud?s theories of sexuality, the mythic world of anthropologist Sir James Frazer?s Golden Bough, and the sweeping implications of the literary innovations of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. He also absorbed the despair of the post-war generation, and melded all these influences, first in a series of literary sketches published by the New Orleans Times Picayune and The Double Dealer (a literary magazine) and then in a first novel, Soldier?s Pay. Faulkner meanwhile left for Europe, spending time in Italy and England but reacting most strongly to France, beginning a lifelong love affair with that country. Returning to Mississippi, Faulkner took a series of jobs while working on his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927). For him, 1929 marked the beginning of what critics have come to call ?the great years? (extending to 1942), when he wrote the seven novels (in a total of twenty) that have been judged masterworks. The impetus for this extraordinary outburst came in Sartoris (1929), when Faulkner decided to concentrate on what he came to call his ?little postage-stamp of soil,? Yoknapatawpha County; all the great novels are set there, in or around Jefferson, the county seat. The town obviously depict Oxford and its surrounding Lafayette County. As a result of this focus, Faulkner was able to create a mythic ?cosmos? of his own, with interconnected mythic structures and characters, populating his world with all the various folk he had encountered in life; he made a determined effort to render the experience of women, blacks, and American Indians as well, and showed nostalgia for lost traditions and the vanishing wilderness, while simultaneously decrying materialist culture and racial injustice. Faulkner?s first masterwork, The Sound and the Fury, was published in 1929. Faulkner wrote this book thinking of a little girl with muddy drawers climbing a pear tree to look in on her grandmother?s body lying in state in the parlour. The story, told in three successive first person narration by three brothers and finally through the consciousness of their black housekeeper, keeps circling back to the same issues in different voices. Documenting, in a radical new prose style, both the loss of familial love and honour and the decline of a great culture, the book caused a sensation among critics but sold poorly, as did its successor, As I Lay Dying (1930).
Faulkner, desperate for money, embarked on the first of several unhappy stints in Hollywood as a scriptwriter (1932?1936; 1942?1945; parts of 1951 and 1954). He wrote much of his next novel, Light in August (1932), during a trip to New York. One of his two or three greatest works, it details the deceptively simple frame story of Lena Grove, a country woman wandering the South searching for the father of her unborn child. This narrative interconnects on many levels with the one it encloses, the much longer and tragic tale of Joe Christmas, an orphan like Lena, who may or may not have black blood. The novel probes deeply into race, religion, and sexuality, and the role of memory and the past in the human consciousness. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is generally considered Faulkner?s most monumental achievement. Four narrators, including Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury and his Harvard roommate, Shreve McCannon, attempt to decipher the mysteries surrounding the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a self-made planter and God-like creator of Supten?s Hundreds, a huge plantation. The novel plunges into the darker recesses of personal histories, exploring incest, inter-racial love, psychic perversion, and materialist obsession, while simultaneously rendering the sufferings of blacks and whites during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the South?s attempts to come to terms with its tragic history.
Faulkner experimented in The Wild Palms (1939), alternating chapters of two discrete narratives, one concerning a convict?s efforts to bring a woman and her baby safely out of a Mississippi flood, the other focusing on a tragic and adulterous love affair. He returned to form in his last two masterworks, The Hamlet (1940) and Go Down Moses (1942). The former, Faulkner?s finest comedy, begins a trilogy of novels about the rise of the Snopes family, which continues in The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Go Down Moses, generated by Faulkner?s revision and union of existing stories, concerns the efforts of Ike McCaslin to repudiate the tragic racial history of his family, which includes his grandfather?s siring of a child on his mulatto daughter. The narrative builds to a climax in what is perhaps Faulkner?s most powerful and sustained piece of writing, ?The Bear,? which uses a hunt to explore the meaning of history, manhood, and responsibility to nature.
The course of his career was always uncertain, and all of his books except ?Sanctuary? were out of print before Malcolm Cowley?s publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946, which began a reassessment of Faulkner?s career. Faulkner?s Collected Stories appeared in 1950, setting the stage for his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature, where his short but powerful acceptance speech caused a sensation; he predicted that man would not only endure; he would prevail. Faulkner?s last decade combined increasing bouts with illness, accident, and alcoholism, with public appearances and pronouncements. His dogged, often heroic commitment to a dissection of racism indicates an agreement with W.E.B. Du Bois?s assertion that ?the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.? Faulkner?s profound sense of history and tradition was in no way a curb on his appetite for modernist solutions?both stylistic and philosophical?to literary, social, and spiritual problems. He stated, a few years before his death, that ?the writer?s first job…? is ?always to search the soul…To search his own soul, and to give a proper, moving picture of man in the human dilemma.?
ERNEST HEMINGWAY iller) Hemingway (1898-1
Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, because he was recuperating from injuries sustained in an aeroplane crash while hunting in Uganda. Ernest Hemingway was born inn Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway published his earliest stories and poems in his high school newspaper. Upon his graduation in 1917, Hemingway worked six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. He then joined volunteer ambulance unit in Italy during World War I. In 1918 he suffered a severe leg wound and was twice decorated by the Italian government. His affair with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, gave basis for the novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929). The tragic love story was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper. After the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, where wrote articles for the Toronto Star. In Europe Hemingway associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who edited some of his texts and acted as his agent. Later Hemingway portrayed Fitzgerald in A MOVEABLE FEAST (1964), but not in a friendly light. Fitzgerald, however, regretted their lost friendship. When he was not writing for the newspaper or for himself, Hemingway toured with his wife, the former Elisabeth Hadley, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1922 he went to Greece and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923 Hemingway made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona’s annual festival.
Hemingway’s first books, THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS (1923) and IN OUR TIME (1924), were published in Paris. THE TORRENTS OF SPRING appeared in 1926 and Hemingway’s first serious novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES, on the same year. The novel deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Main characters are Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes. Lady Brett loves Jake, who has been wounded in war and can’t answer her needs. Although Hemingway never explicitly detailed Jake’s injury, is seem that he has lost his testicles but not his penis. Jake and Brett and their odd group of friends have various adventures around Europe, in Madrid, Paris and Pamplona. In attempt to cope with their despair they turn to alcohol, violence, and sex. The story is narrated in first person. As Jake, Hemingway was wounded in WW I. They share also interest in bullfighting. Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success as a novelist. In 1957 the story was adapted into screen. The film was directed by Henry King, starring Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner.
After the publication of MEN WITHOUT WOMEN (1927), Hemingway returned to the United States. Hemingway divorced in 1927 and on the same year he married Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion editor. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929. The scene of the story is the Italian front in World War I, where two lovers find a brief happiness. The novel gained enormous critical and commercial success. In 1930s Hemingway wrote such major works as DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932), a non fiction account of Spanish bullfighting, and THE GREEN HILL OF AFRICA (1935), a story of a hunting safari in East Africa. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," is perhaps the most quoted line from the story. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937) was made into a film by the director Howard Hawks.
Wallace Stevens once termed Hemingway "the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of extraordinary reality is concerned." By ‘poet’ Stevens referred to Hemingway’s stylistic achievements in the short story. Among his most famous stories is ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ which begins with an epitaph telling that the western summit of the mountain is called the House of God, and close to it was found the carcass of a leopard. In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers, he supported the cause of the Republicans. In Madrid he met Martha Gellhorn, a writer and war correspondent, who became his third wife in 1940. In TO WHOM THE BELLS TOLL (1940) Hemingway returned again in Spain. He dedicated the book to Gellhorn – Maria in the story was partly modelled after her. The story covered only a few days and concerned the blowing up of a bridge by a small group of partisans. The theme of the coming of death also was central in the novel ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (1950).
In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He also armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and monitored with his crew Nazi activities and their submarines in that area during World War II. The first years of his marriage with Gellhorn were happy, but he soon realised that she was not a housewife, but an ambitious journalist. Gellhorn called Hemingway her "Unwilling Companion". She was eager to travel and "take the pulse of the nation" or the world. In early 1941 Gellhorn made with Hemingway a long, 30,000 mile journey to China. Just before the Invasion of Normandy in 1944, Hemingway managed to get to London. Before it, he had taken Gellhorn’s position as Collier’s leading correspondent. Hemingway observed the D-Day landing below the Normandy cliffs; Gellhorn went ashore with the troops. Hemingways’s divorce from Gellhorn in 1945 was bitter. In 1946 Hemingway returned to Cuba and he married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, whom he had met in a London restaurant in 1944.
Hemingway’s drinking had started already when he was a reporter. He tolerated large amounts of alcohol and it did not affect the quality of his writing for a long time. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his head. He was overweight and the blood pressure was high. After weeks of heavy drinking in Spain, Hemingway went to a doctor, who noted that the author already had clear signs of cirrhosis of the liver.
Across the River and Into the Trees was Hemingway’s first novel in a decade and poorly received. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. The 27,000 word novella told a story of an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who finally catches a giant marlin after weeks of not catching anything. As he returns to the harbour, the sharks eat the fish, lashed to his boat. The model for Santiago was a Cuban fisherman, Gregorio Fuentes, who died in January 2002, at the age of 104. Hemingway also made a fishing trip to Peru in part to shoot footage for a film version of the Old Man and the Sea.
Much of his time Hemingway spent in Cuba until Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. He supported Castro but when the living became too difficult, he moved to the United States. When visiting Africa in 1954, Hemingway was in two flying accidents and was taken to a hospital. In the same year he started to write TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, which was his last full-length book. Part of it appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1972 under the title African Journal. In 1960 Hemingway was hospitalised, for treatment of depression, and released in 1961. During this time he was given electric shock therapy for two months. On July 2 Hemingway committed suicide with his favourite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of Hemingway’s novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light, depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. It is one of the worst books published by a Nobel writer.
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