Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Anderson suggested Paris because it was inexpensive and it was where "the most interesting people in the world" resided. There Hemingway would meet writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career".[27] Hemingway was a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man."[29] He lived with Hadley in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, and rented a room nearby for work.[27] Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris,[30] became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack;[31] she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Lost Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The Sun Also Rises.[32] A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris.[33] He eventually withdrew from Stein's influence, and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that spanned decades.[34]

Pound was older than Hemingway by 14 years when they met by chance in 1922 at Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company. They visited Italy in 1923 and lived on the same street in 1924.[29] The two forged a strong friendship; in Hemingway Pound recognized and fostered a young talent.[33] Pound—who had just finished editing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land—introduced Hemingway to the Irish writer James Joyce,[29] with whom Hemingway frequently embarked on "alcoholic sprees".[35]

During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star newspaper.[36] He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and "Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany".[37] Almost all his fiction and short stories were lost, when in December 1922 as she was traveling to join him in Geneva, Hadley lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the train station Gare de Lyon. He was devastated and furious.[38] Nine months later the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris. All that remained after the loss of suitcase were two of the stories the volume contained; he wrote the third story early in 1923 while in Italy. A few months in our time (without capitals) was produced in Paris. The small volume included 18 vignettes, a dozen of which he wrote the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the corrida. He considered Toronto boring, missed Paris, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist.[39]

Hemingway, Hadley, and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into an apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs.[39] Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published works by Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as well as some of Hemingway's own early stories such as "Indian Camp".[40] When Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time, was published in 1925, the dust jacket bore comments from Ford.[41][42] "Indian Camp" received considerable praise; Ford saw it as an important early story by a young writer,[43] and critics in the United States praised Hemingway for reinvigorating the short story genre with his crisp style and use of declarative sentences.[44] Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility".[45] Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year: Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.[46]

The year before, Hemingway visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, for the first time, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.[47] The Hemingways returned to Pamplona again in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.[48]

A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later.[49] A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began extensively revising the manuscript. Pauline Pfeiffer, the daughter of a wealthy Catholic family in Arkansas, who came to Paris to work for Vogue magazine, joined them in January. Against Hadley's advice, Pfeiffer urged Hemingway to sign a contract with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers and, on his return, began an affair with Pfeiffer during a stop in Paris, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.[50] The manuscript arrived in New York in April; he corrected the final proof in Paris in August 1926, and Scribner's published the novel in October.[49][51][52]

The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation,[53] received good reviews and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".[54] Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[55]

Hemingway's marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on The Sun Also Rises.[52] In early 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July.[56][57] On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises.[58] They were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.[59]

Before his marriage to Pfeiffer, Hemingway converted to Catholicism.[60] They honeymooned in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, and he planned his next collection of short stories,[61] Men Without Women, which was published in October 1927,[62] and included his boxing story "Fifty Grand". Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands ... the best prize-fight story I ever read ... a remarkable piece of realism."[63]

By the end of the year Pauline was pregnant and wanted to move back to America. Dos Passos recommended Key West, and they left Paris in March 1928. Hemingway suffered a severe head injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer.[64] After his departure from Paris, Hemingway "never again lived in a big city".[65]