October 29, 1954

Hemingway Is the Winner Of Nobel Literature Prize

Special to The New York Times

tockholm, Sweden, Oct. 28--The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded today to Ernest Hemingway. The Swedish Academy, which presents this laurel, said of the 55- year-old American author in its citation:

"For his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evinced in 'The Old Man and the Sea.'"

The choice of Mr. Hemingway had been generally foreseen in Stockholm literary circles, although there were many candidates to choose from. Halidor Laxness, Icelandic writer, was perhaps Mr. Hemingway's principal competitor. The fact that Mr. Laxness had received the Stalin Prize for Literature might have swung the vote for Mr. Hemingway.

Others who were considered included Paul Claudel and Albert Camus of France and Ezra Pound, American poet, whom the Academy regards as one of the world's distinctive lyricists.

["I am very pleased and very proud to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature," Mr. Hemingway said at his home near Havana. The author disclosed that he would not be able to go to Stokholm Dec. 10 to receive the award because of injuries he suffered in two plane crashes in Africa last winter.]

The Academy seriously discussed Mr. Hemingway for the prize last year, but postponed giving him the honor in favor of Prime Minister Churchill, whose advanced age was considered a factor in the choice.

Several Academy members expressed regret over this postponement when it was thought Mr. Hemingway and his wife perished last Jan. 23 in an air crash in the African jungle.

An indication of Mr. Hemingway's popularity here was the interest shown in this year's selection. Stockholm newspapers were deluged for hours this afternoon by phone calls from persons eager to learn the result. The recurring question was: "Did Hemingway get it?"

Mr. Hemingway is the fifth American to win the literary honor. The others were in chronological order: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck and William Faulkner.

In the literary "Hall of Fame," this quintet shares places with such as Kipling, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Yeats, Shaw, Galsworthy and Pirandello. The prize first was given here in 1901, according to the will of Alfred Nobel, Swedish donor, the creator of dynamite.

Mr. Hemingway's books are extensively read in Scandinavia. His style has served as a model for many of its young authors.

The Noble Prize is worth $36,000 and the winner also gets a gold medal and an illuminated diploma.

The writer drew on his experiences as a fisherman in "The Old Man and the Sea," which won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The short novel tells of the victory and defeat of an old Cuban fisherman.

Career Marked By Wars

Writer Reported, Fought In and Based Books on Conflicts

The most concise biography of Ernest Hemingway was written by his friend Archibald MacLeish:

Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master-- Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April city.

The "April city" was Paris, where Hemingway went to write in the Nineteen Twenties, after having fought on the Italian front in World War I. In Paris he lived above a sawmill, not to be Bohemian but to save money.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, at Oak Park, near Chicago. In most reference books and in his own conversation he is one year older because he gave 1898 as his birth date when he tried to enlist early in 1917, and stuck to that date ever since.

His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician and sportsman. The medical and hunting trips that came with that heritage are reflected in several of Hemingway's stories.

Like other doctors' sons--Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara and company-- Hemingway decided to be a writer. After his graduation from Oak Park High School he got a job on The Kansas City Star. The tough assignments to fights of all sorts that he covered there can be recognized in his short stories.

His attempts to get into World War I carried him to many Allied recruiting centers until he was accepted by an ambulance service. That period was transmuted in "A Farewell to Arms." He transferred to the Italian infantry and a few days before his nineteenth birthday, in July, 1918, he was severely wounded on the Piave. He won four decorations for bravery.

After the war, there was not much for him in the way of jobs around Oak Park. Also, he had learned to like Europe. He worked on The Toronto Daily Star and Weekly and then went abroad as a correspondent for Canadian and United States papers, serving in France and the Middle East.

"I was trying to write then," he recalled, "and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt rather than what you were supposed to feel, was to put down what really happened in action, what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.

"The real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it."

No one would buy Hemingway's stories in the early Twenties. They all returned "in the mail through a slit in the sawmill door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, contes, etc.," he later wrote.

Gradually, through such friends as Ford Madox-Ford, Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, he was recognized. His first great success was his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," which appeared in the spring of 1926.

From then on, the story of his life became almost a part of the public history of the American era, and decidedly a part of its legends. With "The Sun Also Rises," and his remark, quoted by Dorothy Parker, that courage is grace under pressure, he gave a generation of youths a series of attitudes for living.

A strange byproduct of this was a surge of interest in bull-fighting. For a time, New York speakeasies were full of expert aficionados who had never been near a bull-ring.

The art of the torero, Hemingway said in "Death in the Afternoon," "is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

Although Hemingway was once widely regarded as the leading expatriate of his time, he has lived in various parts of the United States as well as the Caribbean.

"A Farewell to Arms" was written in Paris, Key West, Pigott, Ark.; Kansas City, Mo., and Sheridan, Wyo.; "To Have and Have Not" at Key West, in Cuba and Spain, and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in Cuba and Idaho, after Hemingway's return from his service as a correspondent for this and other newspapers in the Spanish Civil War.

In recent years he has lived mainly at Finca Vigia, San Francisco de Paula, in Cuba. He does his deep-sea fishing near there. From there also he has made many safaris to France, Spain and Italy, as well as Africa, where last January he read his obituaries after his plane crashed in the jungle.

Hemingway, in World War II, hunted German submarines in the Caribbean as commander of his own sub-chaser. He later went to the European theatre as a war correspondent and flew combat missions with the Royal Air Force.

The prizewinner has been married four times. His first wife was Hadley Richardson. This marriage, like the next two, to Pauline Pfeiffer and Martha Gellhorn, ended in divorce. He wed Mary Welsh, a war correspondent, after World War II.

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