Friday, 27 January 2012

B2 Literary Mayhem No.13 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

before you read this: don't forget to send me your Kerouac translations before Sunday midnight!

Friends,
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. So, here's what I've got to say:

"For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed." (Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 was awarded to Ernest Hemingway "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC_ZksjsnRQ
Words from Ernest Hemingway and music from Fugazi. 
A Come Up, Kinch production.
Gil (Owen Wilson) is introduced to Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris
Aleksandr Petrov, the one man Army behind this classic adaptation, has achieved so many well deserved prestigious awards for this once in a life time movie.
readings from the novella, plus interviews with folks from Cuba who knew Papa back in the day, including Ernesto Garcia Gutierrez.

Ernest Miller Hemingway
Born: 21 July 1899, Oak Park, IL, USA
Died: 2 July 1961, Ketchum, ID, USA
Residence at the time of the award: USA
Prize motivation: "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style"
Language: English
Ernest Miller Hemingway

Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel,The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

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