Ernest Hemingway as a Reporter and Journalist

A different look at a member of the 'Lost Generation.'

The biographies of great world-class writers sometimes include periods closely tied to newspaper work, a correspondent's or editor's post, and journalism itself. The circumstances authors cover in their journalistic work are often sharp, controversial, and sometimes dangerous. They give rise to plots, characters, or settings for new fiction.

This was true of Ernest Hemingway, an American writer known for his fiery temperament. Hemingway wrote some of his most famous novels under the influence of various conflicts, often while directly caught up in the thick of it: both World Wars, the Greco-Turkish War, and the Spanish Civil War.

Ernest Hemingway and His 'Adrenaline Journalism'

Even in school, Hemingway gained journalism experience, working as a reporter and editor for the school newspaper Trapeze, where he published around 30 pieces. In writing fiction, he drew inspiration from English authors: Shakespeare, London, Stevenson, and Kipling. But the only subject where Ernest excelled was English.

Right after school, Ernest wanted to go to the front, but he was too young. So Hemingway's father made him find a job, and he eventually landed an interview at one of the largest American newspapers of the time, the Kansas City Star, thanks to his uncle Tyler's connections.

Unlike other American newspapers, the Kansas City Star trained journalists in-house rather than hiring experienced ones.

Writer Charles Fenton has quoted the paper's deputy editor as saying that they had no need for people from big newspapers, or for people who bounced from one paper to another across the country, since they trained their own people, and did so very well.

Hemingway was hired as a 'cub reporter' (from the English 'cub reporter,' literally 'baby-animal reporter'). Hemingway's work at the Kansas City Star lasted from October 1917 to April 1918, and by the end of it, he was already writing a piece a day. The editor-in-chief taught him journalism's core rules: specificity, simplicity, and brevity.

Hemingway was responsible for covering police precincts, train stations, and hospitals. He'd walk through them to find out if there was anything worth a spot in the paper. Working 'on the street' gave Hemingway the ability to quickly adapt to different people, their rhythms and speech patterns, and to recreate them on the page in a 'living' style, which would later show up in his writing career through fast, varied dialogue.

Hemingway has described how, on 15th Street, you'd get material about crimes, usually minor ones, but you could always stumble onto something real, and how the city train station was the city's gateway, where he'd run into shady characters and interview celebrities passing through, while the city hospital, set off from the station, was where you could learn about accidents and double-check crime reports involving violence, he wrote.

Editor-in-chief Colonel Nelson said that the young reporter liked movement, action.

Nelson has described how, instead of waiting for an ambulance carrying an injured person, Hemingway would ride with the paramedics straight to the scene of the accident, always wanting to be there in person, adding that he believed this shaped Hemingway's later career, wrote Nelson.

The Kansas City Star had a kind of 'editorial policy' on writing style, calling for 'short sentences and paragraphs,' 'vivid language,' and other rules. A few were stressed to Hemingway, especially often: 'don't overuse adjectives, especially extravagant ones like excellent, superb, grand, wonderful, and so on.'

Hemingway has said he felt the same responsibility to follow these rules as if he'd been read a military code, calling them the best rules of the writing craft he'd ever learned and saying he never forgot them, adding that anyone with any talent who wrote honestly about what they wanted to say couldn't write badly if they followed them, he said in a 1940 interview with The Kansas City Times.

After seven months on the job, Ernest Hemingway left the position and eventually joined America's war effort in Italy during World War I. His newspaper work shaped him, and editorial deadlines taught him the discipline of writing, so 'print media' became a good 'school' of writing.

Writer and biographer Charles Fenton has described it as the perfect preparatory school, one that taught him the demands of accuracy, the obligations of vigorous prose, and the requirements of forceful narrative.

The Relaxed Toronto Star

During World War I, Hemingway drove a Red Cross ambulance. After returning from the Italian front wounded, Hemingway rested and recovered at his parents' home in northern Michigan. He spent most of his time fishing, writing, reading, and, in the meantime, getting to know and befriending the neighboring Connable family, who invited him to Canada in the summer of 1919 to look after their younger son. An acquaintance of the elder Connable, Gregory Clark, managing editor of the Star Weekly, offered Hemingway a contract with the magazine, paying half a cent per word. For the magazine, that was pocket change, but for Ernest, it was experience and practice.

The Toronto Star Weekly was strikingly different from the Kansas City Star. Midwestern American newspapers demanded strict rule-following and taught you how to properly construct sentences. Canadian publications were more 'flexible': journalism there was mostly free-form, encouraging authors to explore different topics without being tied to breaking news.

Scott Donaldson has described Hemingway's Star Weekly-era work as overly personal for a craft that had drowned itself in objectivity, noting that in his piece about what he'd heard and seen during his transatlantic voyage, Hemingway put his own character, tastes, and even his convictions into the writing, adding that colleagues and editors liked this, since they wanted 'color' from him, and 'color' is what he gave them, noted writer Scott Donaldson.

For the Toronto paper, Hemingway was able to write satire. 'Pictures in Rotation: Toronto's New High-Art Idea,' from February 14, 1920, told the story of a scheme for renting artwork around the city. Editors liked the humor, since the article caught the attention of middle-class readers.

Charles Fenton has written that Hemingway's sense of humor was sharpened by his experience in World War I and by the contrast in seriousness he saw between Chicago and Toronto.

Reporting From a Hot Europe

The wars and territorial disputes across Europe after the Great War were a 'gold mine' for editors at newspapers and magazines on the other continent. Young, talented correspondents were sent overseas more often than experienced ones, since young reporters could be paid less and were eager for the trip. Hemingway was offered the position of international correspondent in Paris, and he accepted.

Ernest was expected to deliver the same thing: fresh, open, colorful, stylish material — just about Europe instead. From there, he wrote mostly about himself and his impressions of life there. 'A Canadian With a Thousand a Year Can Live Very Comfortably and Enjoyably in Paris' was a piece with no real news — more a text about Hemingway's own life.

Hemingway has described Paris in winter as wet, cold, beautiful, and cheap, as well as loud, crowded, and cramped — everything you could want, and cheap, he opened his piece.

Ernest covered political events and processes, such as the conferences in Genoa (1922) and Rapallo (1923). The first involved 29 states and was mostly a financial and economic affair. The second called for a treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union covering diplomatic relations, trade, and mutual renunciation of reparations. The Treaty of Rapallo was the first official recognition of the Soviet Union 'on paper,' which is exactly what Ernest wrote about.

As a witness, the author reported on the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1923. Around the same time, Hemingway wrote about the French-Belgian invasion of Germany's Ruhr region.

Scott Donaldson has described this period as producing some of Hemingway's best articles, combining a sensitivity to the political and economic pressure that pushed the French to occupy the territory with his characteristic attention to the human element — the impact of the occupation on the people he met and spoke with, wrote Scott Donaldson.

In his coverage of the Greco-Turkish conflict, one of Hemingway's headlines was 'A Silent, Ghastly Procession': The Wretched Refugees From Thrace.' There, he described the evacuation of refugees while the opposing military 'followed orders' at the port. As with the Chicago paper, here too Hemingway sought to be right in the thick of events.

He gave life to the terms 'refugee' and 'evacuation' like almost no one before him, wrote scholar James Fishkin.

Hemingway wrote extensively about Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini's dictatorship directly. Scott Donaldson saw Hemingway's preference for describing political figures over other material in how the author's comparisons 'cut them down to ordinary human size.'

The Spanish Civil War was a distinct chapter in Ernest's life. After it began, Hemingway actively supported the Republican forces, and after raising money for them, traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and a screenwriter for the film The Spanish Earth. In the play The Fifth Column, the journalist wrote about the 1937 siege of Madrid, and one of his most famous works, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is devoted to the events of that very war.

After World War II began, in 1940, Hemingway traveled to China, where the Second Sino-Japanese War was ongoing at the time. In 1944, as a war correspondent, he took part in British air force flights, patrolled the coast of Cuba, documented and described the landing at Normandy, and entered previously occupied Paris with American troops on August 25, 1944.

Changes Shaped by His Surroundings

Back in the 1920s in Paris, after five years working in journalism, Hemingway decided to devote himself to writing fiction. Paris was full of creative people, far happier than those in the States, whom the author got to know and befriended, and later wrote about in his memoir A Moveable Feast. In Paris, he saw what the 'Lost Generation' really meant, and realized he belonged to it too. By this point, journalism had already worn on him, since Hemingway loved not the newspapers themselves, but the people and their stories, and loved writing about them.

Throughout his career, Ernest 'hunted' for material for his pieces, even when it wasn't a direct assignment from his editor. Literary scholar Rostyslav Semkiv called Hemingway a 'macho journalist' and stressed that he was 'a vivid, but not always accurate, journalist.'