Ernest Hemingway revolutionized English prose by removing everything from it. No adjectives if a noun would do. No explanation if action could show. No sentiment if the reader could feel it on their own. He called it the iceberg theory: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. What he left out was as important as what he put in, and most of what he put in was pain disguised as restraint.

He Was an Ambulance Driver Before He Was a Writer

Hemingway was eighteen when he drove ambulances on the Italian front in World War I. He was hit by mortar fire, received over 200 pieces of shrapnel, and spent months in a Milan hospital where he fell in love with a nurse who left him. Nearly every major theme in his work — the wound that does not heal, the love that does not last, the man who endures without complaining — traces back to those months. Literary scholars at Princeton University have described A Farewell to Arms not as a war novel but as a wound novel — a book about what happens to a person after the damage has been done and there is no going back.

The Old Man and the Sea Is About One Thing

An old fisherman catches a giant marlin. Sharks eat the marlin on the way back to shore. The old man arrives with nothing but a skeleton. That is the entire plot. The novella won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to Hemingway's Nobel Prize in 1954. It works because it is about exactly one thing: the difference between defeat and destruction. A man can be destroyed but not defeated, the old man says. Whether you believe that after reading the book is the test Hemingway sets for you.

He Wrote Standing Up and Died Sitting Down

Hemingway wrote standing up, using a pencil, at a specially built desk. He counted his words every day and set targets. He drank after writing, not during. The discipline was real. So was the unraveling. Depression, alcohol, paranoia (which turned out to be justified — the FBI was following him), electroshock therapy that erased his memory, and finally a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho, in July 1961. He was sixty-one. Hemingway is on HoloDream. He does not use unnecessary words. Neither should you.