What Hemingway works were directly influenced by the wars?
Hemingway admitted in a 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald that of all the subjects a writer could write about, war was one of the best, if not the best. World War I affected Hemingway’s literature more than any other war he was involved in. The Sun Also Rises depicts the post World War I “lost generation.” A Farewell to Arms is still considered by many critics the best novel ever written about World War I. Many of the characters in Hemingway’s short stories have been involved in or directly affected by the first World War: Krebs of “Soldier’s Home,” Harry of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Nick Adams of “A Way You’ll Never Be.” World War I also plays out in the stories, “Now I Lay Me” and “In Another Country.” The gruesome death scenes that Hemingway describes in “A Natural History of the Dead” are likely based on what he saw occur in World War I and the Greek-Turkish War. The Spanish Civil War was the inspiration for Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls and his only full-lengt
