Новий герой в американській літературі. Творчість Е. Хемінгуея.

Among the most outstanding American realists who revealed in his works the truth of American life, showed the tragic fate of young Americans after World War I, reflected the struggle with fascism, exposed industrial conditions and spoke out warmly in defence of labour and depicted the spiritual emptiness of American Society were Theodore Dreiser, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Willliam Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway is one of the most widely read writers of the 20th century. He is a classic of American and world literature. He was bom in Oak Park, Illinois, into the family of a provincial doctor. His father was fond of hunting and fishing, and he taught his son to shoot and fish, and to love sports and nature.

In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, Hemingway volunteered for active service, but he was not taken because of his injured eye. Then he went to Kansas to stay with his uncle. There he began to work as a reporter on the Kansas City Star. The journalistic training he received there marked his style for the rest of his career.

Hemingway's war experience was very important for him. It influenced not only his life, but also all that he wrote. In 1920 Hemingway returned to America and worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star. In 1921 he returned to Europe and settled in Paris. To collect the material for his future stories and novels Hemingway travelled all over the world. He visited Germany, Spain, Switzerland and other countries. His first work Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) was not a success. His next book, a collection of stories entitled In Our Time (1923) won public recognition.

Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) (thesecond title is Fiesta) is his most well-known book. A Farewell to Arms (1929), portraying World War I and its consequences, brought great popularity to the author.

In the late twenties and the thirties Hemingway published two story collections Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933). The most prominent novels written in the first half of the 30's are Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935). Death in the Afternoon describes the bullfights in Spain. The Green Hills of Africa, and his well-known stories The Snow of Kilimanjaro (1936) and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936) were written about Hemingway's hunting trip in Africa. A lover of nature he masterfully describes African landscapes. In 1936 the Civil War in Spain began and Hemingway hurried to Spain to take part in the war as an anti-fascist correspondent and a writer. The next three years of his life were closely connected with the struggle of the Spanish people against the fascists.

He participated in the shooting of a documentary film The Spanish Earth which defended the cause of the Spanish people. Hemingway wrote the film script and did the reading of the text himself. He wrote his only play The Fifth Column (1938) out of his Spanish war experience and a novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which he considered his best work.

In his 1948 preface to A Farewell to Arms he wrote that the people who had "planned the war and would plan another" should be shot on the first day of the war by sentence of the people. He considered World War I" the most colossal, murderous butchery that has even taken place on the earth". On the contrary, the Spanish Civil War was for him "a strange new kind of war", a just war of a people who fought "to be allowed to live as human beings".

World War II also made sense to him as it was a war against fascism.

After the war Hemingway settled on a farm, Finca Vigia, in Cuba, visiting Ame-rica and Spain. He heartily supported the Cuban revolutionaries irrtheir struggle. Simple Cuban people were his friends. In Cuba Hemingway worked on a big novel about the land, the sea and the air. The Old Men and the Sea (1952) is the epilogue of a novel about the sea. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize committee especially mentioned The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway is a great writer who was extremely honest and /hose principles were:

1) never write if you have nothing to say;

2) to write only when you can't help it;

3) to write things you know well.

The Iceberg Theory is the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. Influenced by his journalistic career, Hemingway contendedt that by omitting superfluous and extraneous matter, writing becomes more interesting. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing the underlying themes. Hemingway believed the true meaning of a piece of writing should not be evident from the surface story, rather, the crux of the story lies below the surface and should be allowed to shine through. Critics such as Jackson Benson claim that his iceberg theory, also known as the theory of omission, in combination with his distinctive clarity of writing, functioned as a means to distance himself from the characters he created.

In the novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Anns Hemingway describes the tragedy of the so called "lost generation". The term "lost generation" was introduced by an American writer, Gertrude Stein, who once addressed Hemingway saying: "You are the lost generation".

The "lost generation" were the people who suffered all the horrors of World War I. The post-war generation was disillusioned, because they realized that all the sacrifices and deaths were in vain. The ideals: freedom, brotherhood, justice, patriotism were mere words, in which nobody believed. The "lost generation" saw no purpose in life and gradually it became spiritually dead.

In the first novel the author shows the results of World War I, and in the second — the process which created the "lost generation".The novel A Farewell to Arms is partly autobiographical. Like his hero, Frederick Henry, the writer himself was an American volunteer, a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, was badly wounded, sav? the horrors of the war and came to hate it.

There are two main themes in the novel: war and love. At first Fredric Henry is sure that he is fighting a just war, but gradually he doubts it, and at last he understands that the war is being waged for the benefit of those who profit by it. Frederic's opinion is shared by soldiers, drivers, workers and other common people.

The author proves that private happiness is impossible in the restless world of the 20th century. Seeing misery around him, Hemingway's hero cannot be happy. It also emphasizes the fact that you cannot make a separate peace. The motifs of pessimism and despair are characteristic of the novel, as well as of other works written in the 20's, but in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway for the first time calls World War I a crime against humanity.

Hemingway's style of narration is laconic. He does not use the long detailed descriptions which were characteristic of his predecessors. Inner dialogues are typical for him. He seldom speaks of the feelings of his characters, much is left unsaid, but he manages to make the reader feel what his hero feels.

One more peculiarity of Hemingway's style is the use of weather as an accompaniment to the emotional tones of different scenes. The background of every tragic episode in A Farewell to Arms is "rain". It was raining when Catherine died.

The author proves that private happiness is impossible in the restless world of the 20th century. Seeing misery around him, Hemingway's hero cannot be happy. It also emphasizes the fact that you cannot make a separate peace. The motifs of pessimism and despair are characteristic of the novel, as well as of other works written in the 20's, but in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway for the first time calls World War I a crime against humanity.

Hemingway's style of narration is laconic. He does not use the long detailed descriptions which were characteristic of his predecessors. Inner dialogues are typical for him. He seldom speaks of the feelings of his characters, much is left unsaid, but he manages to make the reader feel what his hero feels.

One more peculiarity of Hemingway's style is the use of weather as an accompaniment to the emotional tones of different scenes. The background of every tragic episode in A Farewell to Arms is "rain". It was raining when Catherine died.