Who was Ernest Hemingway and what is the iceberg theory?

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago, the second of six children of Clarence Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher. Oak Park was, as Hemingway later described it, a place of wide lawns and narrow minds. He wanted something larger.

He became the most stylistically influential American prose writer of the 20th century and one of its most self-destructive human beings.

What is the iceberg theory?#

The iceberg theory -- which Hemingway himself called the "theory of omission" -- is the principle that the dignity and power of a piece of writing comes from what is left out rather than what is put in. The writer knows the full emotional and factual content of a story. The reader receives only the surface. The depth below the surface creates the weight of the text without being visible.

Hemingway stated this most directly in Death in the Afternoon (1932): "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader will still have a strong feeling of those things. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

In practice: Hemingway's sentences are short and declarative. His characters speak in short exchanges that rarely state what they mean directly. What is left unsaid -- the emotion that is not named, the backstory that is not explained, the significance that is not pointed at -- is felt by the reader as pressure rather than information.

The technique is hardest to execute in stories about grief, trauma, and emotional damage, which is why those are the subjects Hemingway returned to most consistently. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933) never names what the old man who stays until closing time is afraid of. "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927) never names the operation the couple discusses. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) never names most of what destroyed the writer it follows. The reader knows anyway.

What did he do before he wrote?#

Hemingway did not go to university. He worked as a journalist for the Kansas City Star at eighteen, where the style guide -- short sentences, active verbs, no superfluous adjectives -- was the beginning of his prose education. He volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War One, was wounded by mortar fire at Fossalta di Piave at nineteen, and fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who ended the relationship by letter.

This experience -- the wound, the love affair, the letter -- became A Farewell to Arms (1929).

He moved to Paris in 1921 with his first wife Hadley, worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and entered the literary world that Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce occupied. Stein called Hemingway's generation "une generation perdue" -- a lost generation -- and the phrase became the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises (1926).

What happened to him?#

Hemingway was married four times, survived two plane crashes in Africa in 1954 (which the Associated Press briefly reported had killed him), received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and suffered increasing depression, paranoia, and loss of cognitive function in the late 1950s.

He was treated at the Mayo Clinic with electroconvulsive therapy, which he felt destroyed his memory and with it his capacity to write. He died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on 2 July 1961. He was sixty-one.

His father had also died by suicide. His brother Leicester died by suicide. His sister Ursula died by suicide. His granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died by suicide in 1996.

What should you read first?#

The short stories before the novels. "Big Two-Hearted River," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" -- these are where the iceberg theory is most precisely executed. The Sun Also Rises is the best novel to start with. A Farewell to Arms is free on Foxing.

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Further reading#

For the tradition of American modernism that Hemingway helped define, what to read after The Great Gatsby covers Hemingway's relationship to Fitzgerald and the period.

For the classic authors cornerstone, who the classic authors were and why they still matter is the broader context.

Sources#

• Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Scribner, 1969 -- the authorised biography
• Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway, Simon and Schuster, 1987
• Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Scribner, 1932