Ernest Hemingway was one of the 20th century's most important writers. His simple, direct style. greatly influenced other writers.
Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a doctor. His mother was a singer who had given up her career to marry.
Ernest learned about nature, hunting, and fishing from his father, The Heminways spent their summers on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, and Ernest was soon able to shoot, fish, and swim very well. He entered first grade a year younger than usual, so he had to work hard to keep up with his older classmates. Ernest read a great deal. He especially liked adventure stories and science. He learned to play the cello so he could take part in family concerts. In high school he got straight A's, edited the school paper, and played in the orchestra. Some of his stories were printed in the school annual.
After high school Ernest got a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. But World War I was on in Europe, and Ernest wanted very much to go. He tried to enlist, but his eyesight was too poor. So he joined the Red Cross and was sent to Italy. He was wounded when distributing supplies to frontline troops and returned home a hero.
He began writing for the Toronto Star and later became the paper's foreign correspondent. He and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, settled in Paris. One of their close friends was the writer Gertrude Stein. She discussed Hemingway' s work with him and encouraged him to do more creative writing. When the Star sent him to cover the war between the Turks and the Greeks, he knew what he wanted his writing to do. He wanted it to show the horrors of war so clearly that readers would experience the horrors themselves and would act to put an end to all war.
In 1923 Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in France. A second book of stories, In Our Time, appeared in 1924. Hemingway then decided to give all his time to independent writing. He began work on his first serious novel, The Sun Also Rises. Its motto was Gertrude Stein's remark, "You are all a lost generation." When it was published in 1926, it became a best seller.
Hemingway was divorced from his first wife and married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. They lived in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway did a great deal of deep-sea fishing while working on A Farewell to Arms (1929). The book was based on his war experiences in Italy. After it was published, the Hemingways went to Cuba for sport fishing. In later years Hemingway bought land in Cuba and lived there much of the time.
He went big-game hunting in Africa and wrote about it in the Green Hills of Africa (1935). The civil war in Spain became the background for his longest novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. (1940). The year it was published Hemingway was divorced a second time and married Martha Gellhorn, a journalist. As correspondents for Coller’s they followed World War Ⅱ in Europe. Hemingway took part in the D-Day invasion and the French Resistance. After his third divorce in 1945, he married Mary Welsh, whom he had met in London during the war.
In 1953 Hemingway's short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), about an old Cuban fisherman, was given a Pulitzer Prize. The book also brought Hemingway the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Hemingway had been living in Cuba but he left in 1960 and settled in Ketchum, Idaho. He was ill and depressed. On July 2, 1961, he shot himself.
Ernest Hemingway's first book was published in______.
A．1923
B．1924
C．1926
D．1929
In the 1920s and the 1930s,the short story, as a form, was difficult to sell. Readers found it an awkward compromise between a poem and a longer novel. The long-short story or novella was scarcely known. Certain comic geniuses like P. G. Wodehouse found it easy to reach and keep a vast public with short stories, either alone or in series. And of course there was W. Somerset Maugham. But the less accomplished writers found the market dwindling even further.
Since 1945, the entire literary picture has changed. Fiction of ail kinds, but above all the short story, has become more and more uneconomic to publish. Many magazines have gone out of business. As a type, the "man of letters", puffing a pipe, has almost vanished, to be replaced by the university lecturer or the television scriptwriter. The public is not attracted by imaginary plots in books but prefers the actual, the real story of real people. For those who do not read at all, television provides an enticing alternative.
Such a decline is in many ways a sad one because the old-time short story had a human quality about it which is now eroded. Yet, in an odd way, in our chaotic electronic age, the short story still has a prospect of living. It has been discovered by film scriptwriters that the form. of the short story provides a useful structure for television; it readily provides the basis for a one-hour programme.
The best title for this passage is ______.
A．The Short Story and Television
B．The Short Story and the Public
C．The Short Story: Past and Present
D．The Short Story: Form. and Content
