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Stylistic Analysis of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

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Stylistic Analysis of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
(July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois to Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. The second of six children, Ernest enjoyed an adventurous boyhood, fishing and hunting with his father in the northern woods of Michigan. After graduating high school, Ernest traveled to Kansas City and worked as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. In 1918, he began service as an ambulance driver for the Italian army.
The 1920's were extremely productive writing years for Hemingway. Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923, In Our Time in 1925. In 1926, The Torrents of Spring and the widely successful novel, The Sun Also Rises were published. A collection of short stories titled Men Without Women followed in 1927. Hemingway continued to write producing what many critics still feel is the best novel ever written about World War I. A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929 and solidified Hemingway's reputation as one the greatest writers of his generation. In the late 1930's, Hemingway ventured to Spain to give his encouragement to the Loyalists fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance would inspire his other great war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short work, earned him a 1953 Pulitzer Prize and ultimately the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. On July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Among characteristics of Ernest Hemingway's writing style can be mentioned the following:
Stark minimalist nature
Austere word choice
Unvarnished descriptions
Short, declarative sentences
Uses language accessible to the common reader
“The Iceberg Theory” is the name given to his writing style by crtics. Influenced by his journalistic career, Hemingway contended that by omitting superfluous and extraneous matter,

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