Hemingway. He took the simple declarative sentence and made it into an art form. Ernest Hemingway (born this date, July 21,1899) invented modern American fiction. An inveterate naturalist, intensive listener, and relentless observer of life, he transformed literature into an adventure bounded only by style and unforgiving truth.

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Ernest Hemingway, 19, recovering from wounds received while driving an ambulance on the Italian front during World War I. That experience inspired his second novel A Farewell to Arms.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” - A Farewell to Arms

Hemingway (left), with fellow expatriates at a café in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925. The group formed the basis for the characters in The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. Duff Twysden (in hat) became Brett Ashley in the book. Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, is in the center.

Hemingway pioneered the style of concise description and terse dialogue. Here, at the end of The Sun Also Rises, his protagonist, Jake Barnes, and erstwhile lover, Lady Brett Ashley, try to come to grips with their ill-fated romance. The scene is Paris.

"Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street. A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.

"'Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together.'

"Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

"'Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

Hemingway, the quintessential (a very un-Hemingway word!) outdoors man. He was also one of the best short story writers in American literature. Below read a quote from his masterpiece Big Two-Hearted River. The protagonist, Nick Adams, has just returned from the war (WWI), though that is not mentioned in the story. This exemplifies another Hemingway technique, the "ice-berg theory." That is, as he said, if you know your subject well enough, you don't have to explain everything. It's significance will come through to the reader. Or, perhaps the reader will glean more from the bare-bones writing than he/she would from any explanatory detail.

"He baited up, then picked up the rod and walked to the tar end of the logs to get into the water, where it was not too deep. Under and beyond the logs was a deep pool. Nick walked around the shallow shelf near the swamp shore until he came out on the shallow bed of the stream.      

"On the left, where the meadow ended and the woods began, a great elm tree was uprooted. Gone over in a storm, it lay back into the woods, its roots clotted with dirt, grass growing in them, rising a solid bank beside the stream. The river cut to the edge of the uprooted tree. From where Nick stood he could see deep channels like ruts, cut in the shallow bed of the stream by the flow of the current. Pebbly where he stood and pebbly and full of boulders beyond; where it curved near the tree roots, the bed of the stream was marry and between the ruts of deep water green weed fronds swung in the current.   

   

"Nick swung the rod back over his shoulder and forward, and the line, curving forward, laid the grasshopper down on one of the deep channels in the weeds. A trout struck and Nick hooked him.

      

"Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the   current, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive against the current, Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came, the spring of the rod yielding to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water, but always bringing him in. Nick eased downstream with the rushes. The rod above his head he led the trout over the net, then lifted.      

"The trout hung heavy in the net, mottled trout back and silver sides in the   meshes. Nick unhooked him; heavy sides, good to hold, big undershot jaw   and slipped him, heaving and big sliding, into the long sack that hung from his   shoulders in the water.      

"Nick spread the mouth of the sack against the current and it filled, heavy with   water. He held it up, the bottom in the stream, and the water poured out   through the sides. Inside at the bottom was the big trout, alive in the water.      

"Nick moved downstream. The sack out ahead of him sunk heavy in the water,   pulling from his shoulders.      

"It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck."

"Papa" at his Cuban villa, Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), where he wrote several novels, including Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Click Hemingway standing up writing to hear his acceptance speech.

Hemingway outside his Paris residence, circa 1925. His Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, was published posthumously in 1964. Hemingway shot himself July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 64 years old.

"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.

"I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'

"So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

"If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.”   - from A Moveable Feast 

Papa liked Fats Waller. At Finca Vigia he walked around singing Waller's "Your Feet's Too Big." Click the photo to open the You Tube recording of the song.