Ernest Hemingway
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 21, 1899(1899-07-21)
Oak Park, Illinois, United States
Died July 2, 1961 (aged 61)
Ketchum, Idaho, United States
Occupation Author, Novelist, Journalist
Nationality American
Genres War, Romance
Literary movement The Lost Generation
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature
1954
Spouse(s) Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1921-1927)
Pauline Pfeiffer (1927-1940)
Martha Gellhorn (1940-1945)
Mary Welsh Hemingway (1946-1961)
Children Jack Hemingway (1923-2000)
Patrick Hemingway (1928-)
Gregory Hemingway (1931-2001)
Influences
Knut Hamsun, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Sherwood Anderson, Pío Baroja, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad
Influenced
Charles Bukowski, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, J. D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Colm Tóibín, Norman Mailer, Mohsin Hamid, Richard Brautigan, K.J. Stevens, Ken Kesey
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 ?- July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War One later known as "the Lost Generation," a term Gertrude Stein used according to his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. ("'That's what you are. That's what you all are,' Miss Stein said. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.'" Stein had overheard a garage owner use the phrase to criticize a mechanic.) He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered basic classics of American literature.
Biography
Early life
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds "Doc Ed" Hemingway-a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Miller Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway's mother once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds".[1] His mother had wanted twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months older) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further "feminised" her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine", but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females.[2] Many themes in Hemingway's work point to destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. "Hills Like White Elephants"), within marital unions (cf. "Now I Lay Me", "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, no connection between Hemingway's depiction of these human conditions and his own early childhood experiences has been established.
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsman hobbies of hunting, fishing and camping in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and athletically; he boxed, played American football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and yearbook, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.[3]
After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."[4] In honor of the centennial year of Hemingway's birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway its top reporter of the last hundred years.
World War I
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He failed the medical examination due to poor vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. On his route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.
Soon after arriving on the Italian Front Hemingway witnessed the brutalities of war. On his first day on duty an ammunition factory near Milan blew up. Hemingway had to pick up the human?-primarily female?-remains. Hemingway wrote about this experience in his short story "A Natural History of the Dead". This first encounter with death left him shaken.
The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror. One of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, entertained Hemingway with a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Act III, Scene II: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."[5] (Hemingway, for his part, would quote this line in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", one of his famous short stories set in Africa.) To another soldier, Hemingway once said, "You are troppo vecchio (It. too old) for this war, pop." The 50-year old soldier replied, "I can die as well as any man."[5]
On 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver. He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries. He was credited as the first American wounded in Italy during WWI by newspapers at the time but there is debate surrounding the veracity of this claim[6].
Hemingway worked in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. With very little in the way of entertainment, he often drank heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. Here he met Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each, who was more than six years his senior. Hemingway fell in love with her, but their relationship did not survive his return to the United States; instead of following Hemingway to America, as originally planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer. This left an indelible mark on his psyche and provided inspiration for, and was fictionalized in, one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's first story based on this relationship, "A Very Short Story," appeared in 1925.
First novels and other early works
After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park,[7] and in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as The Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario.[8] During his stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris.
For a short time from late 1920 through most of 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago, while still filing stories for The Toronto Star. He also worked as associate editor of the Co-operative Commonwealth, a monthly journal. On September 3rd, 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. After the honeymoon they moved to a cramped top floor apartment on the 1300 block of Clark Street.[9] In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a then run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "The Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad.
At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, France, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Toronto Star. Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning of the American expatriate circle that became known as the "Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir, A Moveable Feast. The epithet, "Lost Generation" was reportedly appropriated by Miss Stein from her French garage mechanic when he made the offhand comment that hers was "une generation perdue". His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound,[10] the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."[11] The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States (Hemingway writes of meeting and talking with Joyce in Paris in A Moveable Feast). His own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon.
After much success as a foreign correspondent, Hemingway returned to Toronto, Canada in 1923. During his second stint living in Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He was named John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, but would later be known as Jack. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein to be Jack's godmother.
Around the same time, Hemingway had a bitter falling out with his editor, Harry Hindmarsh, who believed Hemingway had been spoiled by his time overseas.[12] Hindmarsh gave Hemingway mundane assignments, and Hemingway grew bitter and wrote an angry resignation in December of 1923. However, his resignation was either ignored or rescinded, and Hemingway continued to write sporadically for The Toronto Star through 1924.[13] Most of Hemingway's work for the Star was later published in the 1985 collection Dateline: Toronto.
Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story cycle In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.
In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They sometimes exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories.
Hemingway's relationships in France provided inspiration for Hemingway's first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926) (published in the U.K. under the title "Fiesta"). The novel was semi-autobiographical, following a group of expatriate Americans around Paris and Spain. The climactic scenes of the novel are set in Pamplona, during the fiesta that the novel made famous throughout Europe and the U.S. The novel was a success and met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write it after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.[citation needed]
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue.[14] Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing The Killers, one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories. In 1928, Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to Key West, Florida, to begin their new life together. However, their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic event in Hemingway's life.
In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This greatly hurt Hemingway and is perhaps played out through Robert Jordan's father's suicide in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. He immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and stirred up controversy by vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to Hell. At about the same time, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and a friend of Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also committed suicide.
In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the couple a few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after difficult labor, details of which were incorporated into the concluding scene of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway lived and wrote most of A Farewell to Arms plus several short stories at Pauline's parents' house in Piggott, Arkansas. The Pfeiffer House and Carriage House has since been converted into a museum owned by Arkansas State University.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms recounts the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical: the plot was directly inspired by his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan; Catherine's parturition was inspired by the intense labor pains of Pauline in the birth of Patrick; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is obscure, he had already appeared in In Our Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. The success of A Farewell to Arms made Hemingway financially independent.
Key West and the Spanish Civil War
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway returned to Key West, Florida in 1931, where he established his first American home, which has since been converted to a museum. From this 1851 solid limestone house ?- a wedding present from Pauline's uncle ?- Hemingway fished in the waters around the Dry Tortugas with his longtime friend Waldo Pierce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and occasionally traveled to Spain, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. Over the next 9 years, until the end of this marriage in 1940, and then in a second period throughout the 1950s, Hemingway would do an estimated 70% of his lifetime's writing in the writer's den in the upper floor of the converted garage, in back of this house.
Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become an aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. Hemingway considered becoming a bullfighter himself and showed middling aptitude in several novieros before deciding that writing was his true and only suitable professional metier. In his writings on Spain, he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he. Baroja agreed and something of the usual Hemingway tiff with another writer ensued despite his original good intentions.
A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya, moving on to Tanzania, where he hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara and west and southeast of the present-day Tarangire National Park. 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of his African experiences. Hemingway fell ill on this trip, suffering a prolapsed intestine.
In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. While there, Hemingway broke his friendship with John Dos Passos because, despite warnings, Dos Passos continued to report on the atrocities of not only the fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also those of the elected and radicalized left-leaning Republicans whom he favored; characteristically, Hemingway spread a story that Dos Passos had fled Spain out of cowardice.[15][16] In this context Hemingway's colleague and associate Herbert Matthews, who would become more well known for his favorable reports on Fidel Castro, showed a similar predilection for the Republican side as Hemingway. Hemingway, who was a convert to Catholicism during his marriage to his wife Pauline, began to question his religion at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The war also strained Hemingway's marriage. Pauline Pfieffer was a devout Catholic and, as such, sided with the fascist, pro-Catholic regime of Franco, whereas Hemingway mostly supported the Republican government, for all his criticisms of it. During this time, Hemingway wrote a little known essay, The Denunciation, which would not be published until 1969 within a collection of stories, the Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical, suggesting that Hemingway might have been an informant for the Republic as well as a weapons instructor during the war.[16]
Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's life: an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids, kidney trouble from fishing, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.
The Forty-Nine Stories
In 1938?-along with his only full-length play, titled The Fifth Column?-49 stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his foreword, to write more. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Some of the collection's important stories include Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories, among them The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the Republicans, ending the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. Hemingway lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce, Hemingway married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940. It was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West, and was finished in July, 1940. The long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish soldiers on the Republican side. It was largely based upon Hemingway's experience of living in Spain and reporting on the war. It is one of his most notable literary accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate paragraph of John Donne's Meditation XVII.
World War II and its aftermath
The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare. Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United States. After the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage, he went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine. There Hemingway observed the D-Day landings from an LCVP (landing craft), although he was not allowed to go ashore. He later became angry that his wife, Martha Gellhorn ?- by then, more a rival war correspondent than a wife ?- had managed to get ashore in the early hours of June 7 dressed as a nurse, after she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with explosives. Hemingway acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards formed his own partisan group which, as he later wrote, took part in the liberation of Paris.[citation needed] Although this claim has been challenged by many historians, he was nevertheless unquestionably on the scene.[17] It has also been purported that while traveling to the front he threw a hand grenade into a basement room full of German field grade officers despite his official non-combatant role.[citation needed]
After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to comprise "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea). He spent time in a small Italian town called Acciaroli (located approximately 136 km south of Naples). There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (1970).
Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four contentious years, Hemingway married war correspondent Mary Welsh Hemingway, whom he had met overseas in 1944. He returned to Cuba, and in 1945 at the Soviet Embassy became public witness to the Rolando Masferrer schism within the Cuban communist party (García Montes, and Alonso Ávila, 1970 p. 362).
Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and into the Trees (1950), set in post-World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of American Civil War Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich) at the time, Hemingway wrote Across the River and into the Trees as a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell (based on his friend, then Colonel Charles Lanham) and the young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" has an assonance with "rinata", meaning "reborn" in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude, and sentimentality; however this criticism was not shared by all critics.
Later years
One section of the sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's great success, both commercial and critical, satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The next year he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon receiving the latter he noted that he would have been "happy; happier...if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen".[18] These awards helped to restore his international reputation.
Then, his legendary bad luck[citation needed] struck once again; on a safari, he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye and the hearing in his left ear, suffered paralysis of the spine, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg. Some American newspapers mistakenly published his obituary, thinking he had been killed.[19]
Hemingway was then badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident, which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.
A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression was aggravated by his dipsomania. However, in October of 1956, Hemingway found the strength to travel to Madrid and act as a pallbearer at Pío Baroja's burial. Baroja was one of Hemingway's literary influences.
Following the revolution in Cuba and the ousting of General Fulgencio Batista in 1959, expropriations of foreign owned property led many Americans to return to the United States. Hemingway chose to stay a little longer. It is commonly said that he maintained good relations with Fidel Castro and declared his support for the revolution, and he is quoted as wishing Castro "all luck" with running the country.[20][21] However, the Hemingway account "The Shot"[22] is used by Cabrera Infante[23] and others[24][25] as evidence of conflict between Hemingway and Fidel Castro dating back to 1948 and the killing of "Manolo" Castro, a friend of Hemingway.[26] Hemingway came under surveillance by the FBI both during World War II and afterwards (most probably because of his long association with marxist Spanish Civil War veterans[27] who were again active in Cuba) for his residence and activities in Cuba.[21] In 1960, he left the island and Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, that he owned for over twenty years. The official Cuban government account is that it was left to the Cuban government, which has made it into a museum devoted to the author.[28] In 2001, Cuba's state-owned tourism conglomerate, El Gran-Caribe SA, began licensing the La Bodeguita del Medio international restaurant chain relying largely on the original Havana restaurant's association with Hemingway, a frequent visitor.[29]
In February of 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend, Life Magazine bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Lang to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout, before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, the proposal was agreed upon. The first part of the story appeared in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960, with the remaining installments being printed in successive issues.
Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems ?- and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at 170 pounds (77 kg, 12st 2lb).
Suicide
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again. Some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, by way of shotgun to the face. Judged not mentally responsible for his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; some medical and scholarly opinion has been receptive to this view, although others, including one of the physicians who prescribed the electroshock regimen, dispute that opinion.[citation needed]
Hemingway is believed to have purchased the weapon he used to commit suicide at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then an elite excursion goods retailer and firearm supplier. (The shotgun was a Boss & Co ordered through A&F.)[30] In a particularly gruesome suicide, he rested the gun butt of the double-barreled shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over it to put the twin muzzles to his forehead just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers.[31] The coroner, at request of the family, did not do an autopsy.[32]
Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and possibly his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis (bronze diabetes), in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum.[33] Hemingway's father is known to have developed haemochromatosis in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.
Hemingway possibly suffered from manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder, and was subsequently treated with electroshock therapy at Menninger Clinic.[34] He later blamed his memory loss, which he cited as a reason for not wanting to live, upon the ECT sessions.[34]
Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho, at the north end of town. A memorial was erected in 1966 at another location, overlooking Trail Creek, north of Ketchum. It is inscribed with a eulogy 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 - 1939
Celebrating Hemingway's love for Idaho and the frontier, The Ernest Hemingway Festival[35] takes place annually in Ketchum and Sun Valley in late September with scholars, a reading by the PEN/Hemingway Award winner and many more events, including historical tours, open mic nights and a sponsored dinner at Hemingway's home in Warm Springs now maintained by the Nature Conservancy in Ketchum.
Posthumous publications
Hemingway was a prolific letter writer and, in 1981, many of these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters. It was met with some controversy as Hemingway himself stated he never wished to publish his letters. Further letters were published in a book of his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing that Counts [1996].
A long-term project is now underway to publish the thousands of letters Hemingway wrote during his lifetime. The project is being undertaken as a joint venture by Penn State University and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Sandra Spanier, Professor of English and wife of Penn State president Graham Spanier, is serving as general editor of the collection.[36]
Hemingway was still writing up to his death; most of the unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories (portions of which were previously unpublished), The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden.[37] In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream", Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for publication from Ernest's original manuscript". She also stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feel that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing to it." Some controversy has surrounded the publication of these works, insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine whether these works should be made available to the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless omits two-thirds of the original manuscript.[38]
The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories was published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987. As well, in 1969 The Fifth Column and Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War was published. It contains Hemingway's only full length play, The Fifth Column, which was previously published along with the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938, along with four unpublished works written about Hemingway's experiences during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway. Six years later, Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and considerably longer version of True at First Light appeared. In either edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African safari in 1953?-1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes.[39] Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical, macho image[40]), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it through to publication; the novel was published on September 15, 2005.
Also published posthumously were several collections of his work as a journalist. These contain his columns and articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. Finally, a collection of introductions, forwards, public letters and other miscellanea was published as Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame in 2005.
Influence and legacy
The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". (The same story also influenced several of Edward Hopper's best known paintings, most notably "Nighthawks."[41] ) Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. During World War II, J. D. Salinger met and corresponded with Hemingway, whom he acknowledged as an influence.[42] In one letter to Hemingway, Salinger wrote that their talks "had given him his only hopeful minutes of the entire war," and jokingly "named himself national chairman of the Hemingway Fan Clubs."[43] Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in his early novel, The Rum Diary. Thompson's later suicide by gunshot to the head mirrored Hemingway's. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood up. He was all right."-- is known to have inspired Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. Hemingway also provided a role model to fellow author and hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as "the poor man's Ernest Hemingway". Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."
Family
Parents
Father - Clarence Hemingway. Born September 2, 1871, died December 6, 1928
Mother - Grace Hall Hemingway. Born June 15, 1872, died June 28, 1951
Siblings
Marcelline Hemingway. Born January 15, 1898, died December 9, 1963
Ursula Hemingway. Born April 29, 1902, died October 30, 1966
Madelaine Hemingway. Born November 28, 1904, died January 14, 1995
Carol Hemingway. Born July 19, 1911, died October 27, 2002
Leicester Hemingway. Born April 1, 1915, died September 13, 1982
Wives and children
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Married September 3, 1921, divorced April 4, 1927.
Son, John Hadley Nicanor "Jack" Hemingway (aka Bumby). Born October 10, 1923, died December 1, 2000.
Granddaughter, Joan (Muffet) Hemingway
Granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway
Granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway
Pauline Pfeiffer. Married May 10, 1927, divorced November 4, 1940.
Son, Patrick. Born June 28, 1928.
Granddaughter, Mina Hemingway
Son, Gregory Hemingway (called 'Gig' by Hemingway; later called himself 'Gloria'). Born November 12, 1931, died October 1, 2001.
Grandchildren, Patrick, Edward, Sean, Brendan, Vanessa, Maria, John Hemingway and Lorian Hemingway
Martha Gellhorn. Married November 21, 1940, divorced December 21, 1945.
Mary Welsh. Married March 14, 1946.
On 19 August 1946, she miscarried due to ectopic pregnancy.
Tributes and portrayals
Hemingway is the implied subject of the Ray Bradbury story The Kilimanjaro Device. Using the plot device of a time machine, the tale creates a loving tribute that undoes his suicide. The story appears in the Bradbury collection I Sing The Body Electric.
The Ernest Hemingway Hotel in downtown Havana, Cuba was named after the writer, as well as a drink that they serve, the Hemingway.[citation needed]
Hemingway's Resort, at Watamu Marine Park in Malindi, Kenya, is also named for the writer.[citation needed]
In 1999, Michael Palin retraced the footsteps of Hemingway, in Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a BBC television documentary, one hundred years after the birth of his favorite writer. The journey took him through many sites including Chicago, Paris, Italy, Africa, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. Together with photographer Basil Pao, Palin also created a book version of the trip. The text of the book is available for free on Palin's website.
Since 1987, actor-writer Ed Metzger has portrayed the life of Ernest Hemingway in his one-man stage show, Hemingway: On The Edge, featuring stories and anecdotes from Hemingway's own life and adventures. Metzger quotes Hemingway, "My father told me never kill anything you're not going to eat. At the age of 9, I shot a porcupine. It was the toughest lesson I ever had." More information about the show is available at his website
Hemingway's World War II experiences in Cuba have been novelized by Dan Simmons as a spy thriller, The Crook Factory.
Hemingway is portrayed as the stoic butler of Constance Garnett in the Christopher Durang play, The Idiot's Karamazov. Within, Hemingway is subject the every beck and call of the ever-addening translator and ultimately, ends up committing suicide in the final scene.[citation needed]
Hemingway, played by Jay Underwood, was a recurring character in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In one episode, set in Northern Italy in 1916, Hemingway the ambulance driver gives young Indy (Sean Patrick Flanery) advice about women -- only to discover that he and Indy are rivals for the heart of the same woman. (The episode shows Indy unwittingly influencing Hemingway's future writing, by reciting the Elizabethan poem, A Farewell to Arms by George Peele.) In another episode, set in Chicago in 1920, Hemingway the newspaper reporter helps Indy and a young Eliot Ness in their investigation of the murder of gangster James Colosimo.
The 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, about the friendship of two retired men, one Irish, one Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and Piper Laurie.
The 1996 motion picture In Love and War, based on the book Hemingway in Love and War by Henry S. Villard and James Nagel, is the story of the young reporter Ernest Hemingway (played by Chris O'Donnell) as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. While bravely risking his life in the line of duty, he is injured and ends up in the hospital, where he falls in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky (Sandra Bullock).
The 1982 Rush song, Losing It, sings of a dancer and a writer who could no longer perform their crafts. Drummer Neil Peart hints the writer, who was unnamed, was Ernest Hemingway.[45]|date=May 2008}} The song's lyrics indicate, "For you the blind who once could see, the bell tolls for thee." Hemingway had lost his mind later in life and this was a double entendre since Hemingway had written "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
The song "Here's to Life" by Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution, refers to authors Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Albert Camus, artist Vincent Van Gogh, in addition to musician Kurt Cobain, as being influences to Tomas Kalnoky.[citation needed]
The Michigan Humanities Council directed a year long program, The Great Michigan Read, in 2007-2008. It selected the Ernest Hemingway short story collection, The Nick Adams Stories, as the statewide read. It was the first known instance an organization had selected a Hemingway book for a statewide reading initiative.[citation needed]
In the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill, Bond (played by Timothy Dalton) meets with M at the Hemingway House. When asked for his gun after handing in his resignation, Bond exclaims "I guess it's a Farewell To Arms", in reference to the work of the same name.
Anecdotes
In a boxing match with friend and writer Morley Callaghan, Hemingway's lip was cut. Hemingway spit blood into Callaghan's face and said: "The bullfighters do that when they are injured, it is how they show contempt."[citation needed]
In a letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway describes why bulls are better than literary critics: "Bulls don't run reviews. Bulls of 25 don't marry old women of 55 and expect to be invited to dinner. Bulls do not get you cited as co-respondent in Society divorce trials. Bulls don't borrow money. Bulls are edible after they have been killed."[46]
According to various biographical sources, Hemingway was six feet tall and weighed anywhere between 170 and 260 pounds at varying times in his life. His build was muscular, though he became paunchy in his middle years. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and habitually wore a mustache (with an occasional beard) from the age of 23 on. By age 50, he consistently wore a graying beard. He had a scar on his forehead, the result of a drunken accident in Paris in his late 20s (thinking he was flushing a toilet, he accidentally pulled a skylight down on his head). He suffered from myopia all his life, but vanity prevented him from being fitted with glasses until he was 32 (and very rarely was he photographed wearing them). He was fond of tennis and boxing, fonder of fishing and hunting, and hated New York City.[citation needed]
Though Hemingway did not have a favorable opinion of his hometown of Oak Park, IL, describing it as a town of "Wide yards and narrow minds," the town has adopted a favorable opinion about him. Today a Hemingway Museum exists in that town. Every summer a Hemingway festival is staged in that city, complete with a "running of the bulls", using a fake bull on wheels. This festival also features readings of the author's work and Spanish food.[citation needed]
The original short short story. In the 1920s, Hemingway bet his colleagues $10 that he could write a complete story in just six words. They paid up. His story: "For sale: Baby shoes, Never worn."[47] In a contest in Wired magazine inspired by Hemingway's story, 33 authors recently submitted 6-word efforts.[48]
Hemingway's unique prose style spawned legions of imitators and many notable writers have attempted to satirize his style, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and George Plimpton. For thirty years an[49] International Imitation Hemingway Writing Contest was held and writers submitted the 'best bad Hemingway,' and two anthologies of 'The Best of Bad Hemingway' have been published.
The film director Howard Hawks made a bet with Hemingway, saying that he could make a great film from what the author considered his worst book. The result was the classic To Have And Have Not (1944), with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, although the film was only loosely based on Hemingway's original 1937 novel.[citation needed]
Shine Forbes, a local Key West boxer was chosen to be a cornerman for an overmatched young boxer named Alfred "Black Pie" Colebrooks against Cuban boxer Joe Mills; none other than Ernest Hemingway was the referee for the match held at the Blue Goose Arena, now the backyard of the Blue Heaven restaurant. Shine was not aware of who Hemingway was at the time and reportedly thought he looked like a "hippie." Inevitably, Shine attempted to throw in the towel for the doomed Colebrooks, but Hemingway repeatedly threw the towel back. Shine Forbes jumped into the ring and jumped to swing at Hemingway, only to land on his chest. Hemingway then lifted Forbes by the ears and shook him; police soon were on the scene to arrest Shine but Hemingway stopped them saying "Don't arrest him. Any time a man's got guts enough to take a punch at me, he's alright." Shine Forbes apologized that day and became a close friend and sparring partner of Hemingway. Shine Forbes remained a regular at the Blue Heaven until his death in 2000.[50]
Don Knotts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Jesse Donald Knotts
July 21, 1924(1924-07-21)
Morgantown, West Virginia, US
Died February 24, 2006 (aged 81)
Los Angeles, California, US
Years active 1953 - 2006
Awards won
Emmy Awards
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor - Comedy Series
1961 The Andy Griffith Show
1962 The Andy Griffith Show
1963 The Andy Griffith Show
1966 The Andy Griffith Show
1967 The Andy Griffith Show
Jesse Donald Knotts (July 21, 1924 - February 24, 2006) was an American comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show (a role which earned him five Emmy Awards), and as landlord Ralph Furley on the television sitcom Three's Company in the 1980s.
Biography
Early life
Knotts was born in the university town of Morgantown, West Virginia, the son of Elsie L. (née Moore) and William Jesse Knotts. His father's family had been in the United States since the 17th century, originally settling in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.[1] His father had been a farmer, but suffered a nervous breakdown and lost his farm. The family (including Don's two brothers) was supported by Don's mother, who ran a boarding house in town.[2] Knotts' father suffered from schizophrenia and alcoholism and died when Don was 13 years old.[3] Some time later, Knotts graduated from Morgantown High School.
At 19, Knotts joined the Army and served in World War II as part of a traveling GI variety show and as a nurse, including in the Pacific Theater. He did not serve in the Marine Corps as a drill instructor, as has been the subject of a popular urban legend.[4] After the war, Knotts graduated from West Virginia University in 1948.
Career
After performing in many venues (including a ventriloquist act with a dummy named Hooch Matador), Knotts got his first major break on television in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow where he appeared from 1953 to 1955. He came to fame in 1956 on Steve Allen's variety show, as part of Allen's repertory company, most notably in Allen's mock "Man in the Street" interviews, always as a man extremely nervous. The laughs grew when Knotts stated his occupation -- always one that wouldn't be appropriate for such a shaky person, such as a surgeon or explosives expert.
In 1958, Knotts appeared in the movie No Time for Sergeants alongside Andy Griffith. The movie, based on the play and book of the same name, began a professional and personal relationship between Knotts and Griffith that would last for decades.
In 1960, when Griffith was offered the opportunity to headline in his own sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), Knotts took the role of Barney Fife, the deputy -- and originally cousin -- of Sheriff Andy Taylor (portrayed by Griffith). Knotts' five seasons portraying the deputy on the popular show would earn him five Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Comedy.
A summary of the show from the website of the Museum of Broadcast Communications describes Deputy Barney Fife: "Self-important, romantic, and nearly always wrong, Barney dreamed of the day he could use the one bullet (which he kept in his shirt pocket) Andy had allowed him to be issued. While Barney was forever frustrated that Mayberry was too small for the delusional ideas he had of himself, viewers got the sense that he couldn't have survived anywhere else. Don Knotts played the comic and pathetic sides of the character with equal aplomb and aploom."
When the show first aired, Andy Griffith was intended to be the comedic lead with Don Knotts as his "foil", or straight man. But, it was quickly found that the show was funnier the other way around. As Griffith maintained in several interviews, "By the second episode, I knew that Don should be funny, and I should play straight". The years during which the two worked on the show cemented Griffith's lifelong admiration for Don Knotts and their lifelong friendship.
Believing earlier remarks made by Griffith, that The Andy Griffith Show would soon be ending after five seasons, Knotts began to look for other work, and signed a five film contract with Universal Studios. He was caught off guard when Griffith announced he would be continuing with the show after all, but Knotts' hands were tied. Knotts left the series in 1965. (Within the series, it was announced that Deputy Fife had finally made the "big time", and had joined the Raleigh, N.C. police force.)
Knotts went on to star in a series of film comedies which drew on his high-strung persona from the TV series: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968), The Love God? (1969) and How to Frame a Figg (1971). Knotts would, however, return to the role of Barney Fife several times in the 1960s: he made five more guest appearances on The Andy Griffith Show (gaining him another two Emmys), and later appeared once more on the spin-off Mayberry RFD, where he was present as best man for the marriage of Andy Taylor and his longtime love, Helen Crump.
After making How to Frame a Figg, Knotts' 5-film contract with Universal came to an end. He continued to work steadily, though he did not appear as a regular on any successful television series until his appearance on Three's Company in 1979. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Knotts served as the spokesman for Dodge trucks and was featured prominently in a series of print ads and dealer brochures. On television, he went on to host an odd-variety show/sitcom hybrid on NBC, The Don Knotts Show, which aired Tuesdays during the fall of 1970, but the series was low-rated and short-lived. He also made frequent guest appearances on other shows such as The Bill Cosby Show and Here's Lucy. In 1970, he would also make yet another appearance as Barney Fife, in the pilot of The New Andy Griffith Show. (This was particularly odd, as Andy Griffith did not play Sheriff Taylor in this series.) In 1972, Knotts would voice an animated version of himself in two memorable episodes of The New Scooby Doo Movies. He also appeared as Felix Unger in a stage version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple with Art Carney as Oscar Madison.
Beginning in 1975, Knotts was teamed with Tim Conway in a series of slapstick movies aimed at children, including the Disney film The Apple Dumpling Gang, and its 1979 sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. They also did two independent films, a boxing comedy called The Prize Fighter in 1979, and a comedy/mystery movie in 1981 called The Private Eyes. Knotts co-starred in several other Disney movies, including 1976's Gus, 1977's Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and 1978's Hot Lead and Cold Feet.
In 1979, Knotts returned to series television in his second most identifiable role, landlord Ralph Furley on Three's Company. The series, which was already an established hit, added Knotts to the cast when the original landlords, a married couple played by Audra Lindley and Norman Fell, left the show to star in a short-lived spin-off series (The Ropers). Though the role of the outlandish, overdressed, nerdy-geeky-buffoon landlord was originally intended to be a minor recurring character, Knotts was so funny and lovable as a character who fantasized that he was an incredibly attractive lothario, that the writers greatly expanded his role. On set, Knotts easily ingratiated himself to the already-established cast. Knotts remained on the show until it ended in 1984. The Three's Company script supervisor, Carol Summers, went on to be Knotts' agent--often accompanying him to personal appearances.
In 1986, Don Knotts reunited with Andy Griffith in the 1986 made-for-television movie Return to Mayberry, where he reprised his role as Barney Fife yet again. In 1989, he joined Griffith in another show, playing a recurring role as pesky neighbor Les Calhoun on Matlock until 1992.
After his run on Matlock ended in 1992, Knotts' roles became sporadic including a cameo in the 1996 flop Big Bully as the principal of the high school. In 1998, Knotts had a small but pivotal role as a mysterious TV repairman in Pleasantville with Reese Witherspoon. That year, his home town of Morgantown, West Virginia, changed the name of the street formerly known as South University Ave (US 119, SR 73) to "Don Knotts Boulevard" on "Don Knotts Day". Also that day, in a nod to Don's role as Barney Fife, he was also named an honorary Deputy Sheriff with the Monongalia County Sheriff's Department.
Knotts was recognized in 2000 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Though he continued to act on stage, much of his film and television work after 2000 was voice only. In 2002, he would appear again with Scooby-Doo in the video game Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights (Knotts also sent up his appearances on that show in various promotions for Cartoon Network and in a parody on Robot Chicken, where he was teamed with Phyllis Diller). In 2003, Knotts teamed up with Tim Conway again to provide voices for the direct-to-video children's series, Hermie & Friends which would continue until his death. In 2005, he was the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in Chicken Little (2005), his first Disney movie since 1979.
On September 12, 2003, Knotts was in Kansas City in a stage version of On Golden Pond when he received a call from John Ritter's family telling him that his former Three's Company co-star had died of an aortic dissection that day. Knotts and his co-stars attended the funeral four days later. Knotts had appeared with Ritter one final time in a cameo on 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter. It was an episode that paid homage to their earlier TV series. Knotts was the last Three's Company star to work with Ritter.
During this period of time, macular degeneration in both eyes caused the otherwise robust Don Knotts to become virtually blind. His live appearances on television were few. In 2005, Knotts parodied his Ralph Furley character while playing a Paul Young variation in a Desperate Housewives sketch on The 3rd Annual TV Land Awards. He would parody that part one final time, in his last live-action television appearance, an episode of That '70s Show, ("Stone Cold Crazy"). In the show Don played Fez and Jackie's new landlord. Knotts' chilling final masterpiece was Air Buddies, the 2006 direct-to-video sequel to Air Bud, voicing the sheriff's deputy dog Sniffer.
Personal life
The actor was married: To college sweetheart Kathryn (Kay) Metz from 1947-64 and to Loralee Czuchna from 1974-83. He had two children from his first marriage, Karen and Thomas. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death.
Death
Don Knotts died on February 24, 2006, at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California from pulmonary and respiratory complications related to lung cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in recent months, but went home after he reportedly had been getting better [1]. Long-time friend Andy Griffith visited Knotts' bedside a few hours before he died. His wife and his daughter stayed with him until his death.
Knotts' obituaries cited him as a huge influence on other entertainers. Musician and fan J.D. Wilkes said this about Knotts: "Only a genius like Knotts could make an anxiety-ridden, passive-aggressive Napoleon character like Fife a familiar, welcome friend each week. Without his awesome contributions to television there would've been no other over-the-top, self-deprecating acts like Conan O'Brien or Chris Farley."
Knotts is buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. [2]
His hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, has begun creation of a statue of the actor's likeness that will be placed in a special memorial park along the river and Don Knotts Boulevard.[5][6]
Robin Williams
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Influences Richard Pryor
Jonathan Winters
Peter Sellers
Mel Brooks
Stanley Kubrick
Influenced Frank Caliendo[1]
Conan O'Brien
Paul Livingston
Spouse Valerie Velardi (1978-1988)
Marsha Garces Williams (1989-2008)
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actor
1997 Good Will Hunting
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1987 Good Morning, Vietnam
1991 The Fisher King
1993 Mrs. Doubtfire
Best Actor in a Television Comedy or Musical
1978 Mork and Mindy
Cecil B. DeMille Award (2005)
Grammy Awards
Best Comedy Album
1980 Reality...What a Concept
1988 A Night at the Met
1989 Good Morning, Vietnam
Best Spoken Comedy Album
2003 Robin Williams - Live 2002
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Best Cast in a Motion Picture
1996 The Birdcage
Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
1997 Good Will Hunting
American Comedy Awards
Funniest Male Performer of the Year
1987, 1988
Funniest Male Stand-Up Comic
1987, 1988, 1989
Funniest Male Performer in a TV Special
1987 Robin Williams: Live at the Met
1988 Comic Relief '87
1990 Comic Relief III
Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
1988 Good Morning, Vietnam
1994 Mrs. Doubtfire
Robin McLaurim Williams (born July 21, 1951)[2] is an American TV, stage and film actor and comedian who has won an Academy Award for his performance in Good Will Hunting, as well as six Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Grammy Awards. His film career began in 1980 following his success in the television series Mork & Mindy, and he remains active as a film actor and stand-up comedian. He was voted 13th on Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time.
Biography
Early life
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurim (née Smith, 1922-2001), was a former model from Jackson, Mississippi. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906-October 18, 1987) was a senior executive at Ford in charge of the Midwest area. Robin originates from Scotland and Wales. Williams was raised in the Episcopal Church, though his mother practiced Christian Science,[3][4] and he grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Marin County, California. He has two half-brothers: McLaurin and the late Todd (deceased August 14, 2007).[5] In Michigan, he attended Detroit Country Day School, an exclusive college-preparatory school, which boasts other famous alumni, including Steve Ballmer from Microsoft and Courtney Vance from Law and Order: Criminal Intent.[6]
Williams has described himself as a quiet child whose first imitation was of his grandmother to his mom. He did not overcome his shyness until he became involved with his high school drama department.[7] In high school, he won an award for "Most Likely To Not Succeed".[8][9]
Career
In 1973, Williams was one of only 20 students accepted into the freshman class at Juilliard. Even more impressively, Williams, along with Christopher Reeve, were the only students accepted by John Houseman into the Advanced Program at the school that year.[10] Reeve and Williams had several classes together in which they were the only two students. In their dialects class, Williams had no trouble mastering all dialects quickly, whereas Reeve was more meticulous about it. Williams's manic comedy did not impress all of his teachers, but his dramatic performances impressed everyone. Williams and Reeve developed a close friendship, and they remained good friends for the rest of Reeve's life. Williams visited Reeve after the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him from the neck down and cheered him up by pretending to be an eccentric Russian doctor (similar to his role in Nine Months). Williams claimed that he was there to perform a colonoscopy. Reeve stated that he laughed for the first time since the accident and knew that life was going to be okay.[10]
After appearing in the cast of the short-lived The Richard Pryor Show on NBC, he was cast by Garry Marshall as the alien Mork in a guest role in the TV series Happy Days.[11]
As Mork, Williams improvised much of his dialogue and devised plenty of rapid-fire verbal and physical comedy, speaking in a high, nasal voice. Mork's appearance was so popular with viewers that it led to a spin-off hit television sitcom, Mork and Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982. Williams became an overnight sensation, and Mork was featured on posters, coloring books, lunchboxes, and other merchandise.
Starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Williams began to reach a wider audience with his standup comedy, including three HBO comedy specials, Off The Wall (1978), An Evening with Robin Williams (1982), and Robin Williams: Live at the Met (1986). His standup work has been a consistent thread through his career, as is seen by the success of his one-man show (and subsequent DVD) Robin Williams Live on Broadway (2002). He was voted 13th on Comedy Central's list "100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" in 2004.[12]
After some encouragement from his friend Whoopi Goldberg, he was set to make a guest appearance in the 1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "A Matter of Time", but he had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict;[13] Matt Frewer took his place as a time-traveling con man, Professor Berlingoff Rasmussen.
Williams also appeared on an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (Season 3, Episode 9: November 16, 2000). During a game of "Scenes from a Hat", the scene "What Robin Williams is thinking right now" was drawn, and Williams stated "I have a career. What the hell am I doing here?"[14]
He has been accused, especially in recent years, of stealing jokes from other comedians and even paying for material after the fact.[15]
Cinema career
The majority of Williams' acting career has been in film, although he has given some memorable performances on stage as well (notably as Estragon in a production of Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin). His performance in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) got Williams nominated for an Academy Award. Many of his roles have been comedies tinged with pathos, for example The Birdcage and Mrs. Doubtfire.
His role as the Genie in the animated film Aladdin was instrumental in establishing the importance of star power in voice actor casting. Later, Williams once again used his voice talents in Fern Gully, as the holographic Dr. Know in the 2001 feature "Artificial Intelligence: A.I.", the 2005 animated feature Robots, the 2006 Academy Award winning Happy Feet, and an uncredited vocal performance in 2006's Everyone's Hero. Furthermore, he was the voice of The Timekeeper, a former attraction at the Walt Disney World Resort about a time-traveling robot who encounters Jules Verne and brings him to the future.
Williams has also starred in dramatic films, earning himself two subsequent Academy Award nominations: First for playing an unorthodox and inspiring English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989), and later for playing a troubled homeless man in The Fisher King (1991);[9] that same year, he played an adult Peter Pan in the movie Hook. Other acclaimed dramatic films include Awakenings (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998).
In 1998, he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his role as a psychologist in Good Will Hunting.[9] However, by the early 2000s, he was thought by some to be typecast in films such as Patch Adams (1998) and Bicentennial Man (1999) that critics complained were excessively maudlin. In 2006 Williams starred in The Night Listener, a thriller about a radio show host who realizes he's developed a friendship with a child who may or may not exist.
He is known for his wild improvisational skills and impersonations. His performances frequently involve impromptu humor designed and delivered in rapid-fire succession while on stage. According to the Aladdin DVD commentary, most of his dialogue as the Genie was improvised. He is a talented mimic and can jump in and out of characters and various accents at an extremely fast pace.
In 2006, he starred in five movies including Man of the Year and was the Surprise Guest at the 2006 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. He appeared on an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that aired on January 30, 2006.
At one point, he was in the running to play the Riddler in Batman Forever until director Tim Burton dropped the project. Williams had earlier been a prime candidate to play the Joker in Batman. He had expressed interest in assuming the role in The Dark Knight, the sequel to 2005's Batman Begins,[16] although the part of the Joker was taken by Heath Ledger.
He was portrayed by Chris Diamantopoulos in the made-for-TV biopic Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005), documenting the actor's arrival in Hollywood as a struggling comedian and becoming an overnight star when he landed the role in Mork & Mindy.
Personal life
His first marriage was to Valerie Velardi on June 4, 1978, with whom he has one child, Zachary Pym (Zak) (born April 11, 1983). During Williams' first marriage, he was involved in an extramarital relationship with Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress whom he met in 1984. She sued him in 1986, claiming he gave her herpes without notifying her. The case was settled out of court.[17]
On April 30, 1989, he married Marsha Garces, his son's nanny who was already several months pregnant with his child. They have two children, Zelda Rae (born July 31, 1989) and Cody Alan (born November 25, 1991). However, in March 2008, Garces filed for divorce from Williams, citing irreconcilable differences. [18]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Williams had a serious addiction to cocaine; he has since quit. Williams was a close friend and frequent partier alongside John Belushi. He says the death of his friend and the birth of his son prompted him to quit drugs: "Was it a wake-up call? Oh yeah, on a huge level. The grand jury helped too".[9] He was also quoted as saying, "Cocaine is God's way of telling you, you're making too much money."[19]
On August 9, 2006, Williams entered himself into a rehabilitation center for alcoholism. His publicist delivered the announcement: "After 20 years of sobriety, Robin Williams found himself drinking again and has decided to take proactive measures to deal with this for his own well-being and the well-being of his family. He asks that you respect his and his family's privacy during this time. He looks forward to returning to work this fall to support his upcoming film releases."[20]
On August 20, 2007, Williams' elder brother, Robert Todd Williams, died of complications from heart surgery performed in July.
He is currently a member of the Episcopal Church. Williams has described his denomination as "Catholic Lite -- same rituals, half the guilt."
Other interests
Williams is an avid enthusiast of games, enjoying pen-and-paper role-playing games and online video games, recently playing Warcraft 3, Day of Defeat, Half-Life,[21] and the first-person shooter Battlefield 2 as a sniper.[22] On January 6, 2006, he performed live at Consumer Electronics Show during Google's keynote.[23] In the 2006 E3, on the invitation of Will Wright, he demonstrated the creature editor of Spore while simultaneously commenting on the creature's look: "This will actually make a platypus look good."[24] He also complimented the game's versatility, comparing it to Populous and Black & White.
A fan of professional road cycling, he was a regular on the US Postal and Discovery Channel Pro Cycling team bus and hotels during the years Lance Armstrong dominated the Tour de France.[25]
Charity work
Williams and his former wife, Marsha, founded the Windfall Foundation, a philanthropic organization to raise money for many different charities. Williams devotes much of his energy doing work for charities, including the Comic Relief fund-raising efforts. In December 1999, he sang in French on the BBC-inspired music video of international celebrities doing a cover of the Rolling Stones's "It's Only Rock & Roll" for the charity Children's Promise.[26]
Williams has performed in the USO for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq for four years.
and once again when I sang with a pick up band. Recall vividly Santa Tomas e Lucas complimenting me, and that is something that Mexican did NOT do often.
