Hello, I'm Joy Lawrence. Welcome to my
Ernest Hemmingway PowerPoint
presentation. The sources I used are
biography.com,
Nobelprize.org and Hemingway a
Biography. Ernest Hemingway was born in
1899 and died in 1961. I know your book
says that he was born in 1898, but all
the other sources that I have seen have
said 1899, so we're gonna go with that
one. Hemingway liked to think of his
writing as an iceberg where you have one
eighths meaning above the surface and
seven eighths meaning below the surface.
This is something that you may want to
think about when you are reading his
story, Hills Like White Elephants. One of
the things you need to cover in your
literary analysis is Hemingway's
language use. Think about the
conversation that the people are having
in the story. What is it that's not being
said? We can all relate to this; we have
conversations in our own lives where we
feel like there's something you're not
telling me. What is it that you're
withholding? What is beneath the surface?
So, think about that when you're reading
Hemingway's story. He was born July 21st,
1899 in Oak Park Illinois.
This is Hemingway here on the far right.
His father was a doctor. His mother was
an aspiring opera singer who gave up her
chance at a career to stay home and tend
to the family. He, for the first two years
of his life, was treated like a girl. His
mother always wanted to have twins, so
she pretended that Ernest Hemingway was
a girl and the twin sister of his sister
who was close to him in age. While it was
common to dress babies and toddlers in
dresses no matter their gender, as you
see here, it was not common to pretend
that your baby was a different gender so
that you could fulfill your desire to
have twins; that was weird. He was a cub
reporter for the Kansas City Star after
he graduated from high school, and one of
the things that he did was to read this
our style guide Star's Style Guide so that he could
incorporate advice like: use short first
sentences and paragraphs, "use vigorous
English" into his own writing style. When
we entered World War I, he wanted to
join the U.S. Army but was rejected
because of his poor vision, so instead he
joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
July 8, 1918 he was wounded delivering
supplies to soldiers on the front line.
Here he is
recuperating at a hospital in Milan. The
way that he was injured was by mortar
shell and machine-gun fire, and even
though he had several wounds, he was able
to staunch the flow of blood by plugging
his cigarette butts that he had on him
into the holes. He was also able to pull
another soldier back to safety from the
frontline and for this he was awarded
the Silver Medal of Military Valor from
the Italian government. While he was
recuperating in that hospital in Milan.
he met and fell in love with his nurse
Agnes von Kurowsky, and these are
pictures of Agnes von Kurowsky here and
Hemingway with her. She was from
Washington DC and six years older than
Hemingway The two of them would visit
each other.... Let me go back to those
pictures. The two of them would visit
each other, well, she would come and visit
him in his hospital room. They would
write notes back and forth to each other.
It was something they had to keep secret
because it was unseemly then, just as it
would be now, for a nurse to have a
romantic relationship with her patient.
But, at night when nobody else was around
she would come visit him in his hospital
room. You know what I'm saying:
"visit" him. She ended up breaking off the
affair, and in her breakup letter she
wrote, "I expect to be married soon ." That
was not true. She was not really engaged
to be married.
She told Hemingway that in an effort to
soften the blow of breaking up because
that always makes us feel better, right?
When the person who breaks up with us
tells us they already
have somebody there dating? Yeah, that
didn't work so well with Hemingway
either. His revenge that he took on Agnes
was to write a book called Farewell to
Arms where he incorporated some
of his real-life events like the main
character drives an ambulance for the
Red Cross, he's wounded on the front line,
he recuperates in a hospital where he
falls in love with a nurse. The nurse in
that story, though, ends up getting
pregnant and dying in childbirth, and
that is Hemingway's revenge. He moves
back to the United States after he is
done serving in the war and meets and
falls in love with Hadley Richardson.
They met through mutual friends. She was
eight years older than he was, and even
though she was older she was unworldly,
naïve, and inexperienced. They married
September 3rd, 1921. Hemingway met
Pauline Pfeiffer in 1925. She was the
editor for the Paris edition of Vogue
magazine. The two of them developed a
very close relationship, and she also
developed a relationship with Hadley. And,
Hemingway and Pauline started having an
affair.
Hadley discovered the affair. When she
told Hemingway that she knew he told her
that he wanted a divorce so that he could
marry Pauline. She gave him conditions
for the divorce which were that he had
to stay away from Pauline for a certain
period of time, if he could do that
without talking to her seeing her or
sending notes to her she would grant him
a divorce without any trouble.
He was able to do that and
Hadley granted him the divorce. Their
divorce was final in January of 1927.
That following May, Hemingway and Pauline
married. That's something you're going
to see is the overlap in his
relationships. In 1928 Hemingway's father
committed suicide. The controversy that
Hemingway created during this time was
that he was going around talking about
how his father was going to hell. By the
way, this is a picture of Hemingway and
his father shaking hands. Hemingway was a
devout Catholic at this time and so this
was something that was really weighing
on him. A family friend finally pulled
him aside and said, yeah you're really
making people uncomfortable with all
this hell talk. Can you maybe save it
until after the funeral? In 1937, as a war
correspondent, Hemingway covered the
Spanish Civil War. He was joined by
Martha Gellhorn who is here in this
picture and the two of them struck up a
very close friendship. Hmm... I wonder
what's gonna happen. Martha started
spending a lot of time at the Hemingway
household,d became friends with Pauline
said that she "nearly became a fixture
there." He and Martha do start having an
affair, and at this point in their
marriage Pauline and Ernest Hemingway
are starting to grow apart. They fight a
lot about the Spanish Civil War which
might seem weird that a married couple
might fight about something going on in
another country, but this was indicative
of problems in their marriage. As a
devout Catholic, Pauline is siding with
Franco in the Civil War. Hemingway is
starting to move away from Catholicism
at this point, and he does eventually
reach the point of being a complete
atheist, so he is siding with the
revolutionaries of the Civil War, and
this is just reminding them of the
problems in their own marriage.
Hemingway married Martha November 5th,
1940, the day after his divorce from
Pauline became final. Martha Gellhorn
resented being referred to as
Hemingway's wife and being identified as
Hemingway's wife. She was very bright and
talented and a good war correspondent
and writer. she wanted to be recognized
on her own merits. A lot of times when
granting an interview one of the
conditions would be that they were not
allowed to mention Hemingway's name or
that she was his wife. During the d-day
landings that was when war
correspondents really wanted to get that
story, but it was difficult because the
military was keeping them out because of
the danger Hemingway was not able to get in,
but Martha was because she dressed up as
a nurse, pretended she was medical
personnel, and she was able to
get to the shore and scoop the story and
this kind of irritated Hemingway. At this
point they're becoming more rival
correspondents than they are a married
couple. In 1944 he met Mary Welsh, a war
correspondent from Minnesota. The two of
them become close friends. They started
up a relationship and they do start
having an affair. Hemingway and Gellhorn
got a divorce, and Hemingway went back to
Cuba he and and Mary got married on
March 14th, 1946. November 30th, 1960 he was
hospitalized for severe depression. He
went... underwent electric shock therapy
and this, instead of helping, it created
significant memory loss and made it so
that he could no longer write which drove
him even deeper into a deeper depression.
And, this depression can really be seen
even before the electric shock therapy
started when he won the Nobel Prize for
Literature and he could not go but this
is the speech that he wrote. This is an
excerpt from the acceptance speech that
he wrote and he wrote, "There is no
lonelier man than the writer when he is
writing except the suicide..." so that is
something that is already on his mind.
Remember his father committed suicide.
Hemingway does die by committing suicide
July 2nd, 1961. It was two weeks before
his 62nd birthday. Now, when you read
Hills Like White Elephants remember I do
want you to pay attention to the
language use that Hemingway is utilizing
there. What strategies is he using? And
you do, for this one, get to choose
whichever criticism you want to use for
your literary analysis. I hope this
presentation has given you something to
help with reading the story and
understanding Hemingway. Thanks, and I'll
see you next time.
