November 1, 1926
Sad Young Man
THE SUN ALSO RISES
A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young Author Hemingway. His short work (In Our Time, 1925) bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately. He wrote only about things he had experienced, mostly outdoors, as a doctor's son in northern Michigan and as a self-possessed young tramp in Europe. Philosophically his implication was: "Life's great. Don't let it rattle you." Read more...

October 14, 1929
Man, Woman, War
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
This story of Lieutenant Fredric Henry, U. S. ambulance officer on the Italian Front, of his campaigns and leaves of absence, of the swarming Caparetto retreat, of the Lieutenant's affair with Catharine Barkley, an English nurse who died in childbirth when he had deserted the wars and taken her to Switzerland, is infused with the chaotic sweep of armies and tenderly quiescent love. In its sustained, inexorable movement, its throbbing preoccupation with flesh and blood and nerves rather than the fanciful fabrics of intellect, it fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway. His mannered style, consciously bald, may still be annoying to some, but its pulsing innuendo cannot be denied: Read more...

November 4, 1935
Hunter's Credo
GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA
Eleven years have passed since Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, a collection of remarkable short stories. Since then he has written two novels, a parody of Sherwood Anderson, a book on bull-fighting, two more volumes of short stories. In all these he revealed his distaste for literary affectations, his admiration for simple human courage and physical accomplishment, his preference for warm countries, his distrust of people who use big words and indulge in easy generalities. But he has never formulated a statement of the philosophy that has guided him in his writing. Consequently, Green Hills of Africa, which contains such a statement, marks a new stage in Hemingway's development, throws more direct light on his personality than any book he has yet published. Superficially the record of an African big-game hunting expedition, complete with sharp descriptions of wild and sunlit landscapes, childlike natives, killings exciting but not extremely hazardous, it is also packed with Hemingway's comments on literature, politics, revolution and man's fate. Read more...

October 18, 1937
"All Stories End . . ."
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
In the eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan hiloks have begun to seem a little dated; until it began to be bruited that Hemingway was just another case of veteran with arrested development and total recall. Read more...

October 21, 1940
Death in Spain
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
In the '20s Ernest Hemingway created a stripped, hard-boiled prose for telling terse, hard-boiled stories about broken-down bullfighters, ham prizefighters, gallant trollops, homosexuals, mugs, spiritual victims of the war. "The lost generation" quickly turned his books into bestsellers, tried to talk like Hemingway characters as they sipped raw alcohol in speakeasies, tried to write Hemingway stories in garrets and penthouses. None wrote as well as he. Read more...

September 8, 1952
Clean & Straight
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
For a long time Ernest Hemingway has wanted to write a story that he did not think he could. Now he has written it. It is a very short (27,000-word) novel called The Old Man and the Sea, and it may be what he thinks it is: the best work he has ever done. Says Hemingway: "I have had to read it now over 200 times and every time it does something to me. It's as though I had gotten finally what I had been working for all my life." Read more...

November 8, 1954
Life With Papa
Rolling to starboard like an old freighter, Ernest Hemingway lumbered about his weather-beaten manor in the village of San Francisco de Paula, Cuba one day last week, greeting the press. He had summoned reporters and photographers for an announcement from Stockholm. At 55, "Papa" Hemingway had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the announcement came through, he was ready with an uncharacteristic statement: "I am very pleased and very proud to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature." But later, Hemingway could not resist being Hemingway. He seized a microphone and cracked (in colloquial Spanish): "This will notify my friends, or others who are planning to bum me, that the money hasn't arrived from Stockholm yet." Read more...

December 13, 1954
An American Storyteller
Veteran out of the wars before his was twenty: Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master-- Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April city.

Thus Poet Archibald MacLeish recalls one of the great American writers in his days of early glory, back in the 1920s, when it always seemed to be April in Paris. Last week Emest Hemingway was a long way from Paris and a long way from April. He was 55, but he looked older. He cruised in a black and green fishing boat off the Coast of Cuba, near where the Gulf Stream draws a dark line on the seascape. The grey-white hair escaping from beneath a visored cap was unkempt, and the Caribbean glare induced a sea-squint in his brawn, curious eyes set behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Most of his ruddy face was retired behind a clipped, white, patriarchal beard that gave him a bristled, Neptunian look. His leg muscles could have been halves of a split 16-lb. shot, welded there by years of tramping in Michigan, skiing in Switzerland, bullfighting in Spain, walking battlefronts and hiking uncounted miles of African safari. On his lap he held a board, and he bent over it with a pencil in one hand. He was still whittling away at his walnut prose. Read more...

July 14, 1961
The Hero of the Code
Obituary
All stories, if continued for enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.

Ernest Hemingway, the storyteller who wrote those lines, was brushing his teeth. It had been, his wife later recalled, a "calm, good-natured" dinner, and she was sitting in her bedroom in their house in Ketchum, Idaho, when an Italian song she had not thought of for years came into her mind--Tutti Mi Chiamano Bionda (Everybody Tells Me I'm Blonde). Mary Hemingway walked across the hall to her husband's room to sing it for him. "I said, 'I have a present for you.' He listened to me, and he finished cleaning his teeth to join me in the last line." Read more...

May 8, 1964
When Papa Was Tatie
A MOVEABLE FEAST
Unlike the glum testaments and boring memorabilia most men bequeath to the world, Ernest Hemingway left behind an invitation to laugh with him amid the scenes of his youth, where he was happier than he ever would be again. Almost, it seems like a last-minute appeal from a man who suddenly felt himself trapped in his own latter-day legend as "Papa." Read more...

October 5, 1970
Papa Watching
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
Those who forged through last year's biography by Carlos Baker may recall that Ernest Hemingway, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was engaged in writing three loosely linked narratives. Somewhat Delphically, he referred to them as The Sea When Young, The Sea When Absent and The Sea in Being. The first two apparently dealt with a famous painter named Thomas Hudson enjoying a Bahama vacation with his teen-age sons and then, later, hunting German submarines around the Caribbean in his fishing boat during World War II. In his sins, sons, sub chasing and syntax, Thomas Hudson greatly resembled another straight and true artist named Ernest Hemingway. Read more...

May 26, 1986
The Old Man and the Sea Change
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Whoever said dead men tell no tales did not account for Ernest Hemingway. Since he was buried in 1961, ten books have been published with his name on them. They include memoirs, letters, sketches and two novels, Islands in the Stream and now The Garden of Eden, a kinky love triangle about a promising young writer and two women on the leading edge of fashion and sexual mechanics. The setting is the coast of southern France during the mid-1920s. The sun is strong, the water clean, the food good and true. Best of all, the hotel Grau du Roi is a fine place to be a writer named David Bourne, honeymooning and working on a story of a youth and his father tracking a killer elephant in the African bush. Read more...

August 25, 1986
A Quarter-Century Later, the Myth Endures
ESSAY
In 1928 Ernest Hemingway's mother mailed him a chocolate cake. Along with it she sent the .32-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver with which Hemingway's father had just killed himself. Hemingway dropped the pistol into a deep lake in Wyoming "and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight." Read more...