James Baquet

    American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was born at almost the same time as composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) and chemist Linus Pauling (1901-1994), but died around three decades before them. And “thereby,” as Shakespeare said, “hangs a tale.”

    Hemingway was one of the first writers to portray himself as a hard-drinking, bar-fighting tough guy. Not a weak little fellow with glasses, but a manly man who participated in dangerous adventures and then put elements of them in his stories to share with his readers. (Jack London was another such writer.)

    He wrote primarily from the mid-1920s, when he was living with the so-called “Lost Generation” in Paris, to the mid-1950s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

    Seven years later he killed himself.

    Despite his success, his life had not been a particularly easy one. He was wounded while volunteering as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during the First World War. From this experience came his book “A Farewell to Arms” (1929). Later, he observed battles and bombings as a newspaper correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, which inspired “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). And after writing “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952), he went hunting in Africa, where he was in not one, but two plane crashes. He was in pain and bad health for much of the rest of his life.

    His private life was no more peaceful. He was married four times, and divorced three. He became a heavy drinker, and in the last year of his life was hospitalized twice for mental problems.

    Finally, his mental and physical health a wreck, he took his own life at his home in the state of Idaho. Interestingly, his father (a physician), his brother (also a writer), and one of his sisters also committed suicide.

    The “machismo” of Hemingway’s life is reflected in his style — and his nickname. His work is known for using short, repetitive sentences that sound like a tale told by a vigorous workingman, instead of the flowery words of the 19th century authors. And within his own lifetime, he became known as “Papa.” Some have guessed that this might reflect his manliness; others, that he had a softer, more fatherly side, demonstrated in his storytelling like a father speaking to his children.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. manliness

    2. using the same words again and again

    3. the act of killing oneself

    4. using a lot of fancy words; ornate

    5. there is a story to be told about this