Hemingway’s formal education did not extend beyond high school in Oak Park, where he edited the school paper. His training as a writer continued, however, during his time as a reporter in Kansas City and as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He covered the Greek-Turkish War of 1920; the experience inspired some of the most striking and effective of the inter-chapter vignettes in Hemingway’s groundbreaking debut story collection, In Our Time.
Even more influential, perhaps, were the writers Hemingway met while living in Paris during the 1920s (the setting of The Sun Also Rises): the American expatriates Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Irishman James Joyce, and especially Gertrude Stein, also an American. (Stein’s comment about Hemingway and his contemporaries—“You are all a lost generation”—became one of the epigraphs at the start of The Sun Also Rises.) Hemingway liked to claim that he learned about writing from the post-Impressionist paintings of Cezanne—an intriguing notion, though he never made it clear exactly what Cezanne taught him.
Any discussion of Hemingway’s education would be incomplete without a mention of the attention and energy he devoted to the subject matter of his books. Just as he learned to write from the most talented contemporary practitioners of the craft, he apprenticed himself to acknowledged experts in warfare and the “blood sports” with which his work is so often concerned, eventually becoming an aficion (to quote The Sun Also Rises) of these pursuits. He learned about bullfighting from Spanish matadors, big-game hunting from a British guide in East Africa, deep-sea fishing from a native of the Bahamas, and military tactics from career soldiers met in World War I. Hemingway loved mastering the abstruse terminology and complex procedures of each of these activities. As any reader of his work knows, he also was fascinated by food and drink; the pages of Hemingway’s fiction and nonfiction are filled to overflowing with references to foreign dishes and obscure wines and liqueurs. Finally, he was a quick study at languages and was relatively fluent in quite a few.
