Every year we have Hemingway Month. We do this because he is interesting.
He’s an icon of 20th century masculinity, with all the drinking, women and guns but he’s also a mean, misogynistic alcoholic who was worried about how much of a man he was seen as by others. He won both a Pulitzer for fiction and a Nobel Prize for literature by most believe his prolific drinking held him back from his true potential.
He loved the brutal macho nature of bullfighting, big game hunting, chasing dames and wars but he’s suffered from crushing insecurity, paranoia and lifelong concern about his sexuality. He’s writing and lifestyle made him the hero of many, including writers like Hunter S Thompson and a hundred others. His characters and he are always on an adventure to experience the most life they can but most of his characters die and he killed himself by shooting himself in the face.
His writing style is full of curt blunt observations, plain short sentences and mechanical repetition but there’s beauty in it. If you put it all together Ernest Hemingway was not the king of masculinity, he’s this truly remarkable but also tragic guy who lived an insane life.
He won the Italian Silver Medal of Valour and the USA Bronze Star, he survived two incredibly serious plane crashes, he may have been a KGB spy but shit at it or a double agent who knows, he had hunted and killed anything that walked, he had four wives all remarkable women, he drank everything, he told tall tales, he boxed, fished, collected urinals from his favourite bars.
Each day of his life was dedicated to the question “what is it to be a man”?... Every year we have Hemingway Month. We do this because he is interesting.
