Ernest Hemingway

I had some very good English teachers at Salinas High School. Assigned reading included "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Those were the stories and books I read. Ones I didn't finish included A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. I didn't care much for The Old Man and the Sea at the time, but it eventually earned Hemingway a Nobel Prize in literature. I re-read it after I had later developed a taste for Hemingway and still didn't like it much. I did like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms which I read for an English class at American River College in Sacramento, California.

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I read a lot of science fiction in high school, and conventional literature just didn't seem as stimulating to me. But later, in my 20s, as I got more education, I decided that I needed to read some of the recognized great books so I would be well rounded. So when I was at Wright-Patterson AFB in Sacramento, I got a copy of Hemingway's first novel, the one that made him famous, The Sun Also Rises, from the base library. I love it. I also began to see what a big influence Hemingway had on the great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein and others.

After I moved to Wheeler AFB on Oahu I continued to get Hemingway books from the base library. Eventually I read all of Hemingway's books, including his nonfiction such as Death in the Afternoon, A Moveable Feast, and The Green Hills of Africa.

Hemingway approached writing as producing a work of art. Every story of his is a pleasure to read. Another great one is To Have and Have Not, about a fishing charter captain in Cuba, later the subject of a Hollywood movie starring Humphrey Bogart and introducing Lauren Bacall. My favorite is the little known Across the River and Into the Trees. The title seems to me a metaphore for death. Going into the unknown. I believe it ought to become better recognized.

The Wikipedia page for the Hemingway Fishing Tournament in Cuba, begun in 1950 by Ernest Hemingway.

Many people may not know that Hemingway presented the winner's trophy to Fidel Castro at the 1960 fishing tournament in Cuba.

Hemingway outdoors at his writing table.

Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn in Paris.

Hemingway and Fidel Castro during the Ernest Hemingway Marlin Fishing Tournament at Marlovento Marina on May 15, 1960.

On a boat.

Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com