Ernest Hemingway: The Art of the Unsaid
Feature Article | Literature & Fiction
“ Ernest Hemingway taught modern prose to say more by saying less. This essay follows his life from a Midwestern boyhood to wartime Italy, bohemian Paris, Spanish battlefields and a Cuban hilltop home, then looks closely at his major works, his famous economy of style and the code of courage and endurance that runs through his fiction, without ignoring the shadows of his legend. ”
Few writers have shaped the sound of modern English prose as decisively as Ernest Hemingway, and few have been so thoroughly buried beneath their own legend. The man photographed with rifles, marlins and bullfighters was also a patient, anxious craftsman who, by his own account, rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. To understand him, it helps to set the legend aside for a while and read the sentences.
The Boy from Oak Park
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb of Chicago, the second of six children. His father, Clarence, was a physician who loved the outdoors; his mother, Grace, was a musician with cultured ambitions for her family. Between them they gave the boy two worlds that would never quite reconcile: the drawing room and the woods. Summers at the family’s cottage in northern Michigan taught him to fish and hunt, and that landscape later became the setting of his Nick Adams stories.
At school he wrote for the newspaper and the literary magazine, and he did well in English. In 1917, instead of going to college, he took a job as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star. He stayed only about six months, but the experience shaped him for life. The newspaper’s style sheet told young reporters to use short sentences, short opening paragraphs and vigorous English, and to say things positively. Hemingway later credited those rules as among the best he ever learned about writing. Much of what the world would call the Hemingway style began as newsroom discipline.
War and a Wound
Eager to see the war in Europe, but turned away by the army because of weak eyesight, Hemingway joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in 1918. On the night of 8 July, near Fossalta di Piave, a mortar shell struck as he was handing out chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers. He was seriously wounded in the legs, and he spent months recovering in a Milan hospital, where he fell in love with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. The romance faded, but the hospital, the injury and the sense of a world suddenly made fragile would return in A Farewell to Arms.
He was nineteen. He had learned very young what many of his characters would spend whole books discovering: that you can be hurt at any moment, and that how you carry yourself afterward is a kind of answer.
Paris and the Making of a Style
In 1921 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson and moved to Paris, working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and writing fiction in the early mornings. Paris in the 1920s was a workshop for modern literature. He met Gertrude Stein, whose hosting and blunt advice mattered to him, and Ezra Pound, who championed disciplined, exact language. He browsed the shelves of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, and spent hours in galleries studying how painters, especially Cézanne, built emotion from simple, solid forms.
The apprenticeship paid off. His collection In Our Time appeared in 1925, and in 1926 The Sun Also Rises made his name. Its portrait of damaged, drifting expatriates, set between Paris and the bull-running fiesta at Pamplona, came to symbolise what Stein called a “lost generation.” In 1927 he divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer, and the couple soon settled in Key West, Florida.
The Major Works
Hemingway’s best-known books cluster around a few decades and a few preoccupations: the aftershock of war, the dignity of skill, and the loneliness of the individual in front of death.
The Sun Also Rises (1926) captures a postwar generation numbed by what it has seen, with Jake Barnes, wounded in the war, unable to consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley. Nearly everything important is left unspoken. A Farewell to Arms (1929) turns his Italian experience into a love story set against the retreat from Caporetto, and it ends with a stark, restrained scene of loss that still feels startling for its calm.
The short stories may be his most lasting achievement. “Hills Like White Elephants” is a conversation at a railway station in which the real subject is never named. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” confronts emptiness in a few pages. “Big Two-Hearted River” describes a fishing trip so carefully that readers slowly realise it is also a portrait of a man holding himself together. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” looks back over a writer’s wasted talent as he lies dying on safari.
The Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway covered as a journalist in 1937 and 1938, led to For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel about an American explosives expert fighting alongside Spanish guerrillas. His non-fiction, Death in the Afternoon (1932) on bullfighting and Green Hills of Africa (1935) on hunting, reveal his love of ritual, danger and craft, as well as his habit of lecturing the reader.
After a period in which critics thought his powers fading, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) restored his reputation. The short novel follows Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman who hooks an enormous marlin after eighty-four days without a catch, and who fights to bring it home. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy praising his mastery of narrative and his influence on contemporary style. After his death came A Moveable Feast (1964), a luminous memoir of his Paris years, followed by other posthumous works.
The Style: The Iceberg and the True Sentence
Hemingway’s style is easy to recognise and surprisingly hard to imitate. Its surface is plain: short declarative sentences, concrete nouns, few adjectives, and a rhythm that often links statements with the simple word “and.” Characters talk in short exchanges that circle around what they really mean. Feelings are rarely named, and they are conveyed instead through objects, gestures and the weather.
Beneath the surface lies the idea he explained in Death in the Afternoon, now known as the iceberg principle or theory of omission. A writer who knows his subject deeply, Hemingway argued, can leave out what he understands, and the reader will still feel it, because the unstated part gives the visible part its weight. Like an iceberg, only a fraction of the work is seen above the water, but the rest is what holds it up.
His craft owed much to journalism, but also to relentless revision. In A Moveable Feast he describes calming himself when stuck by telling himself he only had to write one true sentence, the truest he knew. That modest instruction contains his whole method: begin with what you actually saw, felt or knew, state it exactly, and trust it.
An illustrative rewrite in the spirit of his style. Neither line is Hemingway’s own.
The Philosophy: Courage, Endurance and the Void
Hemingway never wrote a philosophy, but his fiction returns steadily to a few convictions. The first is courage in the face of suffering, which he once described as grace under pressure. His best characters, from the wounded Jake Barnes to the aged Santiago, are not triumphant. They are people who keep their dignity, do their work well and accept what comes without complaint. Critics later called such figures “code heroes.”
The second conviction is that endurance matters more than victory. Santiago’s great marlin is eaten by sharks on the way home, yet the story insists on his worth. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” he says, and the sentence has become the most famous summary of Hemingway’s ethic. The meaning is not that suffering is avoidable, but that character is revealed in how one meets it.
A third strand is darker. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” an old man sits late in a café while two waiters talk. One of them mocks the prayer to “nothing” with a bitter joke. The story suggests that when belief fails, small things like light, order and cleanliness are what keep despair at bay. Beneath the manliness of his legend, Hemingway’s fiction is haunted by this void, and by the question of how to live decently with it.
Finally, there is an almost religious respect for craft and for doing things properly: baiting a hook, planting a mine, killing a bull cleanly, shaping a paragraph. In Hemingway’s world, precision is a moral act. To know a thing exactly, and to say it exactly, is the closest he comes to a creed.
Fame, Wounds and the Final Years
As Hemingway’s fame grew, so did the public figure: the hunter, fisherman, soldier-journalist and drinker. He reported on the Spanish Civil War and, in the 1940s, on the Second World War. In 1940 he moved to Cuba and made a home outside Havana, Finca Vigía, where much of his later work was written. He married four times, to Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, and the stormy private life often unsettled his writing.
Illness and injury followed him. In January 1954, while on safari in Africa, he survived two plane crashes in successive days, which left him in pain for much of the rest of his life. When the Nobel Prize came that year he was too unwell to travel to Stockholm. In 1960 he left Cuba, and he spent his final period in Ketchum, Idaho, struggling with depression and failing health. He died there on 2 July 1961, aged sixty-one, by his own hand. It is a sobering reminder that even the most confident public figures can carry unseen suffering, and that strength and vulnerability are not opposites.
Complexity and Criticism
A fair portrait of Hemingway must include the objections. Some readers find the macho posturing wearying, and many scholars have questioned how he drew women characters, though others point to subtle and sympathetic portraits and to his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden, which explores fluid ideas of gender and desire. His fiction also contains casual ethnic stereotypes and prejudice that have aged badly, as in the treatment of the Jewish character Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. His love of blood sports raises questions of its own, and his self-mythologising sometimes bordered on self-parody.
- Economy and precision of prose
- The craft of the short story
- Emotional force through restraint
- A profound influence on modern writing
- The macho persona and its excesses
- Treatment of women and of minorities
- Stereotypes in places that have aged poorly
- The uneven quality of his later novels
The Legacy: What a Writer Can Learn
Hemingway’s influence runs through twentieth-century fiction, from the spare realism of later American short-story writers to journalism and screenwriting. More than any particular technique, what he left behind is a standard: that a sentence should earn its place, that feeling is strongest when it is trusted to the reader, and that writing is hard work done honestly, day after day.
Nearly seventy years after his Nobel Prize, and more than sixty after his death, Hemingway remains a writer to argue with and a writer to learn from. The legend will keep changing. The sentences, plain, exact and quietly strange, are still there to be read.
Feature Article | Literature & Fiction
American modernism, the short story and the art of understatement
Editorial Note
References and further study
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
———. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
———. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
———. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.
———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.
———. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Plimpton, George. “Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21.” The Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway.
The Nobel Prize. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954: Ernest Hemingway.” NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/summary/.
Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
Comments