Hemingway

Hemingway was born on July 22nd, 1899 in Illinois, Chicago. His mother wanted twins, and when she didn't get that she often dressed Hemingway and his older sisiter alike with the same hairstyles so that they looked like twins. His mother wanted him to enjoy music but he preferred being outdoors with his dad doing things like fishing, hunting, etc. Being with nature so early in life gave Hemingway a lifelong passion for being outdoors, on adventures and living in isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September 1913 until June 1917. He was great both academically and athletically and displayed particular talent in English class. His first writing experience was in the school paper and yearbook in his junior year and then wirking as editor in his senior year.
He didn't want to go to college so, instead, he began his wrting carrer as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Even though he only worked there for six months he nevcer stopped following the Star's guide for his writing style.
They named Hemingway their top reporter of the last 100 years.
Against his fathers wishes, he tried joining the United States Army to see what happened in World War One. He failed the medical examination because of his poor vision and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
On his first day an ammunition factor blew up and he had to pick upo the remaindçs of the people in there. This first encounter with death left him shaken.
In July 1918, Heminway was wounded delivering supplies to the soldiers and this ended his carrer as an ambulance driver. He was later rewarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor for saving a wounded soldier even with his own wounds.

Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky but their relationship did not last long. She became involved with an Italian officer. This provided inspiration for one of his earliest novels.
After the war, Hemmingway returned to his home town and started working for the Toronto Star newspaper. He became freinds with another reporte, Morley Callaghan ç, who also wrote novels highly praised by Hemingway.
On September 3rd Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson . In December 1921 they moved abroad, to Paris.
After much success as a foreign correspondent, they returned to Toronto where their son John Hadle Nicanor Hemingway, later known as Jack, was born.
Hemingway fell out with his editor around the same time. Harry Hindmarsh said Hemingway had been spoiled by time over seas. He resigned, but his resignation was ignored or just rescinded because he carried on working for the Toronto Star through 1924.
Hemingway met Scott Fitzgerald at a bar, and were at first close friends. They drank and talked alot. They also swapped manusripts and Fitzgerald tried to do alot on Hemingway's career but this relationship cooled of because thaey started to become competitive.
Hemingway divorced Hadley in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, an ocasional fashion reporter.
In 1928 they moved to Key West, Florida.
However, their new life was soon interrupted by a tragic event.
Hemingway's father had diabetes and financial instabilities. He comitted suicide using an old civil war pistol. He immediatley travelled to Oak Park to organize the funeral.
At the same time, another friend of Hemingway, also comitted suicide.
Their second son Patrick was born in the same year, and their third son, Gregory, was to be born a few year later.
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway returned to Key West in 1931, and established his first american home which is now a museum.
Over the next 9 years, until this marriage ended in 1940 and a bit into the 1950's, Hemingway spent alot of his life in the writers den in the converted garage.
In the fall of 1933 a safari took him to Kenya, leading, later to Tanzania. 1935 saw the publication of his book about his safari experience.
In 1937 Hemingway travelled to Spain to report on the civil war. While there, Hemingway broke his friendship with Dos Passos.
Some health problems charecterized this part of Hemingway's life.

The United States entered World War II on December 8th, 1941 and Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare. His crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening shipping of coast.
After the FBI took over he went to Europe as a war correspodent for Colliers magazine. There he observed the D-Day landings from a landing craft but he was not allowed on the shore.

Newly divorced from Gellhorn, he mnarried war correspondent, Mary Welsh Hemingway. He returned to Cuba and became public witness to the Rolando Masferrer schism within the Cuban communist party.
Later Years.
The Old Man And The Sea was published in 1952 and it earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Then his traditionally bad luck struck again. On a safari he was in two plane crashes and very badly injured. Some of the American newspapers mistakenly published his death thinking he was dead.
Then one month later he was badly injured by a bushfire accident. The pain left him in anguish and couldn't travel to Stockholme to receive his Nobel Prize.
A bit of hope came when they discovered some of his earlier manuscripts in the cellar of the Ritz, although some of his energy was restored, his heavy drinking kept him down. His blood pressure and cholestorol was high, and he had aortal inflammation, his depression also aumented by his heavy drinking. However, in October 1956 he had the strength to go to Pío Baroja's burial, one of his literary influences.
In Februrary, 1960 he had trouble getting his bullfighting novel to the publishers and therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend Will Lang Jr. to leave Paris and come to Spain. The first part of the story was published in hos magazine and then the rest in the succesive issues.
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, receiving yet again ECT treatment.
Some weekes after his 62nd birthdau he took his own life on the morning of July 2,1961 at his home wqith a shotgun blast to his head. He was buried in a Roman Catholic service. He himself blamed the ECT for ruining his carrer by destroying his memory.
Other members of Hemingway's family also comitted suicide.
Heminway was interred in the town cemetry. a memorial was erected in 1966 at antoher location. It is inscribed with a euolgy he wrote for a friend, Gene Van Guilder:

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever

Ernest Hemingway -Idaho- 1936

The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is a boy who lives in America. A widow adopts him but his drunk dad comes looking for him for his money. He takes Huck to a log cabin by the river. Huck finds a canoe and while his dad is gone, escapes. He found a black man on the island and they ran away together. As they go down the river they get to know diferent towns and things. They get split uo and Huck stops in a big house. The fanmily has a fight with another family and Huck gets his chance to run away. He finds Jim and as they were going two men came running up to them.A "king" and a "duke".
They went from town to town acting, making money and then getting kicked out.
They go to a house pretending to be lost brothers of a dead man and try conning the dead man's daughters. They take the money that the dead man left his daughters but Huck felt bad and stole it of them and hid it in the coffin.
The king and the duke then got found out as conmen and were asked about a mark on the man's body. So they went to look and found the money. Huck and one of the daughters came up with a plan and Huck went from the house and left the king and the duke to get arrested.
Then they found Jim and took him. Huck went to a nearby house and pretended he was their nephew. It turns out their real nephew was Tom Sawyer. Tom came and pretended to be a stranger. They found Jim in a shed and helped him escape.
"Sid" who was really Tom, gets hurt and tells aunt Sally that they helped set " the run-away nigger" free.
In the end Aunt Sally adopts Huck. He hates it.
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My Opinion

I really liked the book because of trhe adventures and the mischeif they get into. It's also funny. At first it was hard to understand because it is written in the way you would say it but then I got used to it. The only thing I didn't like was the end. It was a bit boring. It just says "my aunt is going to adopt me and try to civilize me. I hate it. I've been there before".
I would reccommend this book, and wouldn't mind reading another of Mark Twains books.

William Shakespeare

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak,--yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

William Shakespeare

Four Weddings And A Funeral.

This is a group of friends that have never got married or fallen in love, but one day two of them get married. Charles, the main caracter, met in that wedding an American girl called Carrie. He speaks to her a bit and really likes her.
In the second wedding he sees Carrie again, but with her fiance. He is upset.
The third wedding was Carrie's. In that wedding one of the friends died.
Then it was the funeral.
The fourth wedding is really unexpected... It leads to a surprising ending!

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In the funeral, the man's partner reads a famous poem. This is it:

Funeral Blues.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W.H. Auden.

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W.H. Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English Literature at Church. His early poems, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were a mix of obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, and were written in an intense and dramatic tone. He then got bored of this and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes and weren't as dramatic as his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England where his father was a physician. Wystan was the third of three boys; the oldest became a farmer; the second, became a geologist. His mother, had trained as a missionary nurse.
In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, because his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.
Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".