At the dawn of the twentieth century, a writer emerged who learned his craft not in a classroom, but in battlefields, bullrings, and bars. To some, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest writer of his generation. A Nobel laureate whose sparse, muscular prose changed literature forever. But to others, he was a swaggering egotist, a man addicted to danger and performance, obsessed with his own legend. His own life fuelled his work, just as his work in turn fed his own myth. But behind the mask he forged through his writing lay a man haunted by fear, violence, and the tyranny of bravery.

 

But why, more than sixty years after his death, does Hemingway remain a symbol of masculinity and modernism? Who were the people whose lives were swept up in the hurricane of his own? And how did the same passions that made Hemingway great also destroy him in the end?



This is a Short History Of Ernest Hemingway.



A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Paul Hendrickson, author, journalist, professor, and the writer of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost.



Written by Sean Coleman | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw



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