Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway has long been required reading for students in the United States. His comment once was “All you have to do is write one true sentence” He was born in the United States, but spent much of his young adult years as an expatriate. Beginning in his twenties Ernest Hemingway was traveling, loving and drinking throughout Europe. This provides the setting for a number of his books, like The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway’s declaration about writing one true sentence is the way he dealt with any possibility of writer’s block. He wrote sentence after sentence, starting with the first to create narratives of fighting and fishing and bull fighting. He lived life large and to his own standards. This idea of writing one true sentence is expressed in the memoir A Moveable Feast. Ernest Hemingway was a man on the move, always.
Ernest Hemingway began his career as a journalist on the Kansas City Star. Perhaps his journalism background is what gave him the gift of description and simplicity. His fiction was written with accuracy and so it expressed his life and his truth. He was not a writer who dealt in fancy words, and did not hesitate to repeat the same words in his works, if they served the purpose for which they were intended. What Hemingway said to the Nobel Prize committee in 1954 was "A writer should write what he has to say"
Just short of his sixty second birthday, in July of 1961, Ernest Hemingway put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. His father had also killed himself. Hemmingway kept a self appointed date with death but stories he has written have continued to be published posthumously. His posthumous works are not as well regarded as those written during the height of his career.
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