Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, he was an American writer. He mostly wrote short stories and novels and some of the themes he mentioned are the theme of women and death and existentialism. His fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. He was one of the most imitated American writers; he wrote novels and short stories in a manner that came to characterize one pole of the modern fictional idiom. His language is laconic and spare. His plots are simple. The complexity of his fiction lies in its suggestiveness, in the implications of what is said and of what is left unspoken. Hemingway believed fiction should reveal less rather than more, like an iceberg with only its tip exposed above water. He referred to his style as the iceberg theory. The theory is: the meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface. Hemingway had a distanced relationship with his mother.   His mother was a religious woman, active in church affairs, who led her son to play the cello and sing in the choir. Hemingway's early years were spent largely in fighting the feminine influence of his mother. Some claim that he hated his mother. He didn't attend her funeral when she died in June of 1951. Hate may have been a motivating factor in his decision not to go. In 1954 he won a Nobel Prize in literature. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 was awarded to Ernest Hemingway "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".