Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
born
in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper
office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States
entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the
Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the
Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his
return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and
American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such
events as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of
expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important
work, The Sun Also Rises
(1926). Equally successful wasA Farewell to
Arms (1929), the study of an American
ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a
deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil
war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel,
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely
struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers,
hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage
and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who
in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose,
his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are
particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected
inMen Without Women
(1927) and The Fifth Column and the First
Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died
in Idaho in 1961.
above information from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html
Story Overview
"Hills Like White Elephants" is a good story to shatter the false impression that Hemingway was insensitive to women.
This carefully constructed short story has a nameless man and woman discussing their relationship against the backdrop of the mountain landscape.
Readers must pay close attention to small details to understand the progress of the narrative. Readers need to focus on the dialogue between the man and girl in order to discern their relationship.
The issue of abortion and how each speaker feels about it is central to the story. Yet abortion itself is not the main issue; the main issue is the not-too-subtle pressure "the man" is placing on "the girl" to have the abortion that is the key issue.
The central issue in this story is the abortion the girl is being pressured to have by her male companion. The author's stance on the issue of abortion is ambiguous, but the story clearly comes out against the male pressuring the female into an abortion that she doesn't seem to want.