Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand almost 50 years ago, on
July 2, 1961. His fame rests on his evocative stories crafted in
spare prose, his tragic romances of love and death, his vivid
war reporting and his travel books. He was an uneven author, but
wrote at least one great work in every decade of his career. His
description of the Greek refugees retreating after a Turkish
victory—"Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across
the mud flats"—appeared in his first and best book of stories,
"In Our Time" (1925). The novelist Ford Madox Ford praised the
perfection of Hemingway's pure, skeptical and stoical style by
observing, "his pages have the effect of a brook-bottom into
which you look down through the flowing water." "The Sun Also
Rises" (1926), published during the Prohibition era in the U.S.,
portrayed the self-destructive life of U.S. expatriates in
France and Spain as personified by Jake Barnes, rendered
impotent by a war wound. Jake's hopeless love for Brett Ashley,
a promiscuous and excit