Obituary

Last Sunday morning (July 2, 1961) the great author Ernest Miller Hemmingway was found dead, he committed suicide.

He was born on July 21, 1899. In his early life, he lived in Chicago with his father Clarence, a physician, and his mother Grace who was a former opera performer. During World War I, he graduated from High School. When he turned 18, he tried to enlist in the army. Unfortunately he was rejected because of poor vision. He became an ambulance driver instead. He was sent to Europe where he was badly wounded and hospitalized in Milan. He felt in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. Later he lived and wrote for more than ten years in Key West. He suffered through a lot of accidents and disorders in his life. He liked to drink a lot of whiskey, but it was not the alcohol that killed him though.

Hemingway will be remembered for his spectacular writing style. Highly important is, that he based his prose on action rather than reflection. His approach to women in his writing was mainly masculine. He did not go into their inner thoughts and feminine world. Hemingway’s “theory of omission" or "iceberg principle" is all about that if a writer knows enough about the stories topic, he may omit things that he knows. Then the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. “The Hemingway Hero” is defined by a static set of characteristics. Always courageous, confident, and introspective. The Hero is expressed differently in each of his novels, though. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.

The funeral will be in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemmingway lived since 1959.

Journalist: Nanna Mortensen