new it in
the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In each conflict he sought support for the side he
favored. But he insisted on impartially describing the truth of both wars, which he knew
In the years following World War II, many critics said Hemingway's best writing
was past. He surprised many of the critics when the novel, The Old Man and the Sea, was
published.. This work led to his Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Two years later he received the
Nobel Prize for his "powerful, style-making mastery of the art or modern narration"
(Griffin 1) for The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway's years following these awards saw few works as successful as his
novel or earlier writings. Hemingway was devastated that he could no longer write as he
once did. During 1961 Hemingway, troubled by high blood pressure and mental
depression, received shock treatments during two long confinements at the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota. He died July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, as a result of
self-inflicted gunshot wounds and was buried in Ketchum. But as he had hoped, his
writing lives on. His works continue to sell very well and are translated in an amazing
variety of languages around the world.
"For Ernest Hemingway, the secondary world which he constructed in his many
stories and novels served as a mirror to reflect his beliefs about the world in which he
lived" (Relations to Fact Through Fiction 1). Even though he reflected his beliefs in his
works he never portrayed himself as the hero. Instead Hemingway created a hero that
followed the same general code in all of his works. We generally, call this man the "code
hero"-this because he represents a code according to which the hero, if he could attain it,
would be able to live properly in the world of violence, disorder, and misery to which he
has been introduced and which he inhabits. The code hero, then, offers up and exemplifies
certa...