He, like the novel's protagonist, was wounded in the legs. This experience later served as the source material for A Farewell to Arms. In May of 1918, Hemingway volunteered for duty in World War I, serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. After graduation Hemingway became a reporter on the Kansas City Star, where he learned the newspaper's preferred style of simple declarative sentences that was to permanently influence his own style of writing. He wrote poems and articles for the school newspaper, and he also tried his hand at stories.

In school, Hemingway was an active, if not outstanding, athlete. While his father encouraged his son's athletic and outdoor skills, his mother fostered her son's artistic talents. He was the second son of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, who had been an aspiring opera singer. Author BiographyĮrnest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. In Santiago's relationship with the world and those around him, Hemingway had discovered a way to proclaim the power of love in a wider and deeper way than in his previous works. In Santiago, Hemingway had finally achieved a character who could face the human condition and survive without cynically dismissing it or dying while attempting to better it. The work was especially praised for its depiction of a new dimension to the typical Hemingway hero, less macho and more respectful of life. Although Hemingway's writing continued to be published, much of it posthumously after the author's suicide in 1961, The Old Man and the Sea is generally considered by many to be his crowning achievement. Beegel in 'Conclusion: The Critical Reputation of Ernest Hemingway'). The Nobel committee singled out the story's 'natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death,' (noted Susan F. A year later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Nevertheless, the story won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953. Some also found Santiago's philosophizing unrealistic. A few complaints about the stilted language of some of the Spanish transliterations came from critics. The Old Man and the Sea, however, was a popular success, selling 5.3 million copies within two days of its publication in a special edition of Life magazine. His major writing effort during the intervening period, Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950, had been widely dismissed as a near-parody of the author's usual style and themes. When The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 to wide critical acclaim, it had been twelve years since Ernest Hemingway's previous critical success, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

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