Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at eight o’clock in the morning on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. A suburb just outside of Chicago, Oak Park was a growing, middle class, Protestant community at the turn of the century.

Early life.

Ernest was the second child born into the family after his older sister Marcelline. Ernest was baptized later that year on his parents anniversary in October 1899. The family would eventually grow to include six children, three more sisters Ursula, Carol, Madeline (Sunny) and a younger brother Leicester.
Up to 4 years old, mother dressed Ernest Hemingway in outfits for girls. She did it because she dreamed of the birth of a girl for a long time. It is worth noting, that in addition to dresses Hemingway’s mother put white bows on his hair.
As a boy, he was taught by his father to hunt and fish along the shores and in the forests surrounding Lake Michigan. The Hemingways had a summer house called Windemere on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, and the family would spend the summer months there trying to stay cool. Hemingway would either fish the different
streams that ran into the lake or would take the rowboat out to do some fishing there.
He would also go squirrel hunting in the woods near the summer house, discovering
early in life the serenity to be found while alone in the forest or wading a stream. It was something he could always go back to throughout his life, wherever he was. Nature would be the touchstone of Hemingway’s life and work, and though he often found himself living in major cities like Chicago, Toronto and Paris early in
his career, once he became successful, he chose somewhat isolated places to live like Key West, or San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, or Ketchum, Idaho. All were convenient locales for hunting and fishing. When he wasn’t hunting or fishing his mother taught him music.
Grace was an accomplished singer who once had a career on stage, but eventually settled down with her husband and occupied her time by giving voice and music lessons to local children, including her own. Hemingway never had a knack for music and suffered through choir practices and cello lessons, however, the musical knowledge he acquired from his mother helped him share in his first wife Hadley’s interest in the piano. Hemingway went to the Oak Park public school. In high school he was into sports, playing football, swimming, water basketball and serving as the track team manager. Then Ernest became seriously interested in Boxing, which, in fact, made him disabled. During one of the fights with his opponent, Hemingway got a severe head injury. As a result, Ernest Hemingway almost stopped seeing with his left eye and hearing with his left ear. In this regard, he could not pass a medical examination for military service for a long time.
Hemingway enjoyed working on the high school newspaper called The Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles, usually humorous pieces in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular satirist of the time. Hemingway graduated in the spring of 1917 and instead of going to college the following fall he took a job as a cub reporter for
the Kansas CityStar; the job was arranged by his Uncle Tyler who was a close friend of the chief editorial writer of the paper.

World War I

At the time of Hemingway’s graduation from High School, World War I was raging in Europe, and despite Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to keep America out of the war, the
United States joined the Allies in the fight against Germany and Austria in April 1917. When Hemingway turned eighteen he tried to enlist in the army, but was deferred because of poor vision; he had a bad left eye that he probably inherited from his mother, who also had poor vision. When he heard the Red Cross was taking volunteers as ambulance drivers he quickly signed up. He was accepted in December of 1917, left his job at the paper in April of 1918, and sailed for Europe in May. In the short time that Hemingway worked for the Kansas City Star, he learned some stylistic lessons that would later influence his fiction. The newspaper advocated short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy. Hemingway later said: “Those were the best rules I ever learned
for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them.”
Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then travelled to Milan in early June after receiving his orders. He was sent to an ambulance unit in the town of Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918, only a few weeks after arriving, Hemingway was seriously wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar
shell, which had landed just a few feet away. Hemingway’s wounding along the Piave River in Italy and his subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the relationship with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his great novel A Farewell To Arms.

Toronto and Chicago

Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Before the age of 20, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation. As Reynolds explains, “Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee.” He was not able to tell them how scared he had been “in another country with surgeons who could not tell him in English if his leg was coming off or not.”
After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Later that year he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He returned to Michigan the following June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star.
In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson.
In September, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends to the back-country of Michigan’s UpperPeninsula. The trip
became the inspiration for his short story “Big Two-Hearted River”, in which the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams. takes to the country to find solitude after returning from war. It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Star.

Paris

Hemingway of the early Paris years was a “tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man.” He and Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, and he worked
in a rented room in a nearby building. Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris, became Hemingway’s mentor and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter , whom she referred to as the “Lost
Generation” — a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The Sun Also Rises. A regular at Stein’s salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso , Joan Miró, and Juan Gris.
During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star newspaper.
He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as “Tuna Fishing in Spain” and “Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany”. Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was travelling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922. The following September, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on
October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published. Two of the stories it contained were all that remained after the loss of the suitcase, and the third had been written early the previous year in Italy. Within months a second volume, in our time (without capitals), was published. The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Hemingway
had written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the corrida.
He missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist. Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into a new apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs.
Hemingway made his debut in American literature with the publication of the short story collection In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his
minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. “The Big Two-Hearted River” is the collection’s best-known story.

It is the tale of a man, Nick Adams, who goes out camping along a river to fish, while at the same time suffering flashbacks to traumatic, wartime memories. Adams struggles with his grim experiences of death until he finds peace through the act of partaking in nature by coming to the river to fish.

Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound—he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924.

In Paris, Hemingway soon became a key part of what Gertrude Stein would famously call “The Lost Generation.” With Stein as his mentor, Hemingway made the acquaintance of many of the great writers and artists of his generation, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce. In 1923, Hemingway
and Hadley had a son, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. By this time the writer had also begun frequenting the famous Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.

In 1925, the couple, joining a group of British and American expatriates, took a trip to the festival that would later provide the basis of Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is widely considered Hemingway’s greatest work, artfully examining the postwar disillusionment of his generation.

Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway’s second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of short stories, Men Without Women.

In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain—members of the postwar Lost Generation, a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him
to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson’s book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he travelled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced
by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are “The Killers,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” At least in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.
Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with a war story.
Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms, securing his lasting place in the literary canon.

Key West and the Caribbean

During the early 1930s, Hemingway spent his winters in Key West, Florida, and summers in Wyoming, where he found “the most beautiful country he had seen in the American West” and hunted deer, elk, and grizzly bear.

His third son, Gregory Hancock Hemingway, was born a year later on November 12, 1931, in Kansas City. The writer’s wife’s (Pauline’s) uncle bought the couple a house in Key West with a carriage house, the second floor of which was converted into a writing studio. While in Key West, Hemingway frequently invited friends to join him on fishing trips.

In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa. The 10-week trip provided material for Green Hills of Africa, as well as for the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The couple visited Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya; then moved on to Tanganyika Territory, where they hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara, and west and southeast of present-day Tarangire National Park.

Unfortunately, during these travels, Hemingway contracted amoebic dysentery and had to be evacuated by plane to Nairobi, an experience reflected in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”.

Ernest Miller Hemingway –A journalist? A patriot? A soldier? Spanish Civil War

However, the future writer began his travels long before the front experience. Being a child, Ernest and his father, who worked as a doctor, went hunting, fishing or visited Indian reservations.

In 1941, Hemingway went to Baltimore, where he bought a large marine boat at a local shipyard, giving it the name “Pilar”.

He was in contact with the American anti-submarine forces and helped the naval forces of the area and the American government in the Caribbean. Ernest used his fishing yacht “Pilar” as a bait for German submarines that torpedoed allied tankers near Cuba from the West on their way from Venezuela to American and British
ports.
Ernest hoped that some submarines would come to the Pilar with a purpose to demand food and other supplies or would float up to recharge the batteries, and he would be able to sink it. Pilar cruised among the Islands off the North coast of Cuba, ready to drop its bomb on the first submarine that would appear above the water. (Pilar” was a wooden vessel.) Once they saw a model 740 submarine from afar, and they even managed to get within a mile of it. But the boat headed Northwest and disappeared. Hemingway’s dream to damage a German submarine never came true.

Battles in Europe

In 1944, Hemingway participated in combat flights of bombers over Germany and occupied France. And during the landing of the allies in Normandy, he got permission to participate in combat and intelligence operations.
Ernest stands at the head of French partisans numbering about 200 people and participates in the battles for Paris, Belgium, Alsace, in the breakthrough of the “Siegfried line”, and is often seen at the forefront.
In 1947, Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star* for his bravery during World War II.

* The Bronze Star Medal, unofficially the Bronze Star, is a United States decoration awarded to members of the United States Armed Forces for either heroic achievement, heroic service, special achievement, or service in a combat zone. He was recognized for having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions”.
Thus, the data available to us show that Hemingway worked in the 40s and 50s also on novels about the WWII and “marine life”, on books about Paris in twenties (“Holiday, which is always with you”) and the bullfight in Spain (“Dangerous summer”), and possibly on other major works.
In March 1964, in an interview with the correspondent of “Ogoniok” Hemingway’s widow said that there is one unpublished novel left. This is an epic work that covers a significant period of time, including the years of the second world war. “The old man and the sea” is the part of the novel.
The novel “Across the river and into the trees” —is often referred to the Second World War.
In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for “Across the River and into the Trees”, the story of Richard Cantwell, an American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. “Across the River and into the Trees” is Hemingway’s response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. It is Hemingway’s last full-length novel published in his lifetime.

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba

In early 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which began when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they rented “Finca Vigía” (“Lookout Farm”), a 15-acre property 15 miles from Havana. They were married on November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Gellhorn inspired him to write one of his most famous novels For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he started in March 1939 and finished in July 1940. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and “triumphantly re-established Hemingway’s literary reputation” in the words of Meyers. In December 1941 he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit his boat the Pilar, which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.

The platonic love affair
inspired the novel Across the River and into the Trees, written in Cuba during a time of strife with Mary. The following year, furious at the critical reception of Across the River and Into the Trees, he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was “the best I can write ever for all of my life”. The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.

In October
1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mellow says Hemingway “had coveted the Nobel Prize”, but when he won it, months after his plane accidents and the ensuing worldwide press coverage, “there must have been a lingering suspicion in Hemingway’s mind that his obituary notices had played a part in the academy’s decision.” Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm. Instead, he sent a speech to be read, defining the writer’s life: Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

In November
1956, while staying in Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir A Moveable Feast. By 1959 he ended a period of intense activity: he finished A Moveable Feast (scheduled to be released the following year); brought True at First Light to 200,000 words; added chapters to The Garden of Eden; and worked on Islands in the Stream. The last three were stored in a safe deposit box in Havana, as he focused on the finishing touches for A Moveable Feast. Author Michael Reynolds claims it was during this period that Hemingway slid into depression, from which he was unable to recover.

The Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In 1959 he bought a home overlooking the Big Wood River, outside Ketchum, and left Cuba—although he apparently remained on easy terms with the Castro government, telling The New York Times he was “delighted” with Castro’s overthrow of Batista. He was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and the following year for his 60th birthday; however, that year he and Mary decided to leave after hearing the news that Castro wanted to nationalize property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. On July 25, 1960, the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigia was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway’s collection of “four to six thousand books”

Test yourself

Define inaccuracies in the pictures referring to the beginning of the text.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at eight o’clock in the morning on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. A suburb just outside of Chicago, Oak Park was a growing, middle class, Protestant community at the turn of the century.

Find Illinois on the map.

Concerning that Hemingway was baptized, identify religion that refers to the act of baptism

Find Hemingway among famous professional boxers.

Hemingway used to work on high school newspaper The Trapeze. You can see 4 geometrical figures and 5 definitions. One statement is extra. After you read the definitions try to compare them to the pictures.

It is a four-sided figure which is created by connecting 4 line segments. The line segments are all of the equal lengths and they come together to form 4 right angles.
It is a shape where all points have the same distance from the centre. Few real-world examples include a wheel, dining plate, coin etc. Drawing it properly isn’t easy with a running hand.
It has three sides and three angles.
It has a flat shape with four sides, where two of the sides are parallel
It is a figure in the shape of an egg, or of an ellipse.

What musical instrument did Hemingway play? Look and listen.

Fill in the gaps with the correct forms of the words written in capitalized letters.

Ernest Hemingway enlisted as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross, arriving in Paris in May 1918, while the city (TO BE) under German bombardment, before moving on to the Italian front. By June, he was at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he (SEND) to retrieve the workers injured in a munitions factory explosion.

While running a mobile canteen in Fossalta di Piave, he (WOUND) two weeks before his 19th birthday by Austrian mortar fire. Although severely wounded in both legs, he (TO CARRY) an injured Italian soldier to safety and (TO HIT) again by machine-gun fire – an event that saw Hemingway become one of the first Americans to be awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery. Sent to recuperate for six months in a hospital in Milan, he fell in love with an American nurse called Agnes von Kurowsky and (TO RETURN) to Illinois at the end of the war, expecting (SHE) to marry him. Instead, she informed him she (BECOME) engaged to an Italian officer and Hemingway was left alone to face a home town that remained the same while his perceptions of life had been skewed forever.
Check

Fill in the gaps with the correct forms of the words written in capitalized letters.

The Sun Also Rises
Men without Women. In Another Country
The Old Man and the Sea
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Farewell to Arms
The Nick Adams Stories

A. He did not need a compass to tell him where southwest was. He only needed the feel of the trade wind and the drawing of the sail. I better put a small line out with a spoon on it and try and get something to eat and drink for the moisture. But he could not find a spoon and his sardines were rotten. So he hooked a patch of yellow Gulf weed with the gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small shrimps that were in it fell onto the planking of the skiff. There were more than a dozen of them and they jumped and kicked like sand fleas. The old man pinched their heads off with his thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells and the tails. They were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they tasted good.

B. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

C. Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him.

D. We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.

E. Nick looked at the wagon and wondered where it was going, whether the driver lived near the Mississippi and whether he ever went fishing. The wagon lurched out of sight up the road and Nick thought of the World Series game going on in New York. He thought of Happy Felsch’s home run in the first game he had watched at the White Sox Park, Slim Solee swinging far forward, his knee nearly touching the ground and the white dot of the ball on its far trajectory toward the green fence at center field, Felsch, his head down, tearing for the stuffed white square at first base and then the exulting roar from the spectators as the ball landed in a knot of scrambling fans in the open bleachers.

F. They were all eating out of the platter, not speaking, as is the Spanish custom. It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chickpeas in the red wine sauce. It was well cooked, the rabbit meat flaked off the bones, and the sauce was delicious. Robert Jordan drank another cup of wine while he ate. The girl watched him all through the meal. Everyone else was watching his food and eating. Robert Jordan wiped up the last of the sauce in front of him with a piece of bread, piled the rabbit bones to one side, wiped the spot where they had been for sauce, then wiped his fork clean with the bread, wiped his knife and put it away and ate the bread. He leaned over and dipped his cup full of wine and the girl still watched him.

Arrange Hemingway’s novels in chronological order

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
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Check

Read an extract from The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Complete the gaps with the words from the list on the right. Use each word once. There are three extra words.

increasing
spreading
blizzard
scattering
brightly
hardly
heavy
getting
waterfall
avalanche

The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green tents and down along the rock and out onto the plain and along past the smudges that were burning

now, the grass all consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult

him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat. Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain

, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeest, big-headed dots seeming to climb as they moved in long fingers across the plain, now

as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie’s tweed back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeests were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the

forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped down and then another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see how he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead. And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a

, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a

, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going

Discuss the following questions with a partner:

How important was travelling in the writer’s life? How did it influence the content and style of his writing? Compare Hemingway’s house with a writing studio in Florida and his travelling experience. Which, in your opinion, is it more important to have for a writer: a comfortable permanent place for work or exciting experiences and constant change of scene?

TRUE, FALSE, NOT STATED

Read the text below. Use the word given in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the gap in the same line.

In 1940 Hemingway, with his new wife Martha, purchased a home outside Havana, Cuba. He would live there for the next twenty years. The Hemingways named the site Finca Vigia, or “lookout farm.” They shared their home with dozens of Hemingway’s cats, as	LOVE
well as trophies from many hunts and fishing expeditions.	SUCCESS
Hemingway became a fixture of Havana and stayed in the country longer than many Americans chose to after between Cuba and the United States began to deteriorate.	RELATE
He fished aboard his boat, Pilar, and enjoyed the island lifestyle, hanging out in Havana, and entertaining guests at the Finca.	EXTENSE
His home, with many original furnishings, hunting trophies, and personal artifacts can be viewed .	DAY
When not fishing or traveling, Hemingway wrote a great deal from his Cuban home. While little of his work from this time was published during his lifetime, many of the projects that Hemingway worked on throughout the 1940s were later edited and published after his .	DIE

Check

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba. In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Nobel Committee cited it as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954. Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov made a paint-on-glass-animated short film based on the novel The Old Man and the Sea. The film won many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Watch the film by Aleksandr Petrov and do the task according to it. Mark if the statements (1-9) are true (T), false (F) or the information is not stated (NS) in the film.