Ernest Hemingway

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway. At times neither a gentleman nor a good father Hemingway did represent masculinity, an altogether forgotten ideal, trait, a habit of being that has been almost eradicated from men in America. Today's male role model is either an athlete, musician or an actor completely self centered and self absorbed without any pretense of traditional masculinity. Hemingway, despite numerous character flaws lived a life of which most men can only dream, winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes and the Bronze Star, he wrote 27 books and 50 short stories all the while exhibiting world class sports fishing talents to go with big game hunting, boxing, bull fighting and a seemingly endless stream of grand adventures. The preface of The First Forty-Nine Stories sums up his approach to life: "In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused."