Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

"The writer's job is to tell the truth."
-- Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, was born in Oak Park, IL in 1899. He was a member of the "Lost Generation" of American expatriates living and writing in Europe after World War I, along with F. Scott Fitgerald, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos.

Hemingway transformed the writing skills he had learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star into his own brand of terse, powerful prose. As he learned when writing for newspaper wire services, every word had to count. The distinctive style he developed is one of his greatest achievements, although in later years some critics say he hid behind it and devolved into self-parody. Influenced by the styles of Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, and his friend Gertrude Stein, Hemingway also drew his inspiration from the visual arts, citing the influence of the painter Cezanne on his writing.

Hemingway's characters - often American expatriates themselves - search for meaning, purity, and order in the confusion of life after the shattering events of World War I. His protagonists tend to be tough, disillusioned men wrestling with moral dilemmas. Hemingway was less skilled at creating three-dimensional women characters, relying on stereotypes.

More than most other writers, Hemingway was a celebrity during his lifetime, often appearing in the news and posing for photos on the golf course or a fishing boat. He was married four times. At the time of his suicide in 1961, he had two homes: one in Idaho, and one in Cuba, the setting of his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea" (1953).

Though he never lived in the Windy City after 1921, and almost never mentioned it specifically in his work, in many ways his prose remains Midwestern.

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