(bright music) - My name is Kirsten Smith, and we are going on an adventure today.

But before we go, I have a few questions I'd like you to think about.

Have you ever been to a new place, a new city, a new state, a new country?

What did you like about this new place and what was different about it?

A couple of years ago, my family and I traveled west for a vacation at Yellowstone National Park.

On our travels we stopped to see the Badlands in South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, also in South Dakota.

My kids and I were amazed at the different landscapes that existed in front of us.

At Mount Rushmore the massive stone sculptures permanently carved into a mountain side and at the Badlands, the steep slopes and grassy prairies.

We were also amazed at the wonderful people we met on our travels.

People who came from different backgrounds, different locations, different ethnicities, and who were excited to tell us their stories and hear our own.

Experiencing all of these new locations and people was magnificent, and exciting, and memorable.

We couldn't imagine things being even more different than we had just experienced.

And then we arrived in Yellowstone National Park in Northwestern, Wyoming, and things were very different yet again.

From geysers erupting out of the ground to hot springs, from steaming fumaroles, to standing just yards away from amazing and huge buffalo.

We were shocked at how different this location was from anything else we had seen.

Traveling opened our eyes to the beauty that exists in places unfamiliar to us.

We learned about new people, new landscapes, new customs.

With travel, and no matter the distance we learned to look at things in a different way.

And when we venture out, we earn a greater understanding of the world around us and how life has wonderful diversity no matter where you go.

So whether you're traveling to another town, city, state, or country, a wonderful adventure and education awaits, and the memories will stay with you forever.

Now, I bet you're wondering, why are we talking about traveling today?

Well, one of my favorite authors loved to travel.

His name is Ernest Hemingway, and he is known as one of the greatest writers of all time and possibly in some people's opinions, the greatest American writer.

His stories are not just inspirational stories like "The Old Man and the Sea", but they also tell us about characters, experiencing life in other places like Spain, France, even Cuba.

We experience a new world through their eyes, through their experiences, and that's what makes Hemingway stories so popular.

His stories are about real people in real places, learning about and experiencing life.

They face challenges and successes.

They love and they lose.

They cry and they laugh.

And all the while Hemingway takes us along for the ride.

But who was Ernest Hemingway?

Who was this American writer who left such a lasting impression on the world and on literature?

Let's take a moment to learn about the man who is inspired decades of readers and writers.

- Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American, but his palette was incredibly wide and delicious, and violent, and brutal, and ugly, all of those things.

It's something every culture can basically understand.

Every culture can understand falling in love with someone, the loss of that person, of how great a meal tastes, how extraordinary this journey is.

That is not nationalistic, it's human.

And I think with all of his flaws, with all the difficulties, his personal life, whatever, he seemed to understand human beings.

- [Ernest] You see I'm trying and all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive so that when you've read something by me, you actually experience the thing.

You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what as beautiful.

Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe.

Things aren't that way.

It is only by showing both sides, three dimensions and if possible four that you can write the way I want to.

(mellow music) (vibrant music) - [Narrator] Ernest Hemingway remade American literature.

He paired storytelling to its essentials, changed the way characters speak, expanded the worlds a writer could legitimately explore and left an indelible record of how men and women lived during his lifetime.

Generations of writers would find their work measured against his.

Some followed the path he'd blazed, others rebelled against it, none could escape it.

He made himself the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain read and revered around the world.

- It's hard to imagine a writer today who hasn't been in some way influenced by him.

It's like he changed all the furniture in the room, right.

And we all have to sit in it.

To some we can kind of sit on the edge of the orange chair on the arm or do this.

But he changed the furniture in the room.

The value of the American declarative sentence.

The way you build a house brick by brick out of those.

Within a few sentences of reading a Hemingway story, you are not in any confusion as to who had written it.

- I can't imagine how it's possible that any one writer could have so changed the language.

People have been copying him for nearly a hundred years and they haven't succeeded in equaling what he did.

- If you're a writer, you can't escape Hemingway.

He's so popular that you can't begin to write till you try and kill his ghost in you or embrace it.

And I think, identify that most about Hemingway's that he was always questing.

The perfect line had not happened yet.

it was always a struggle trying to get it right and you'll never will.

- Hemingway had a wonderful way of creating stories with simple language.

His language was not full of adjectives and complex phrases.

They were simple, straightforward, clear, and that style was born from his many experiences, his travel, his adventures, his time spent in far away places doing really interesting things.

He told stories that were exciting because he understood what was exciting.

So where did Hemingway travel to gain these experiences?

How did he become so worldly?

To answer these questions, we are going to take a trip around the world, learning about the places Hemingway visited and lived.

We will pay attention to his experiences while also gaining for ourselves some cool information about these locations.

Perhaps you've visited some of them, maybe you haven't.

No matter what today, you'll find an exciting adventure at each stop, and that I promise you.

On our first stop we head to Europe.

While living in Illinois, Hemingway came to know Sherwood Anderson, a prestigious American author, well known for his novels and short stories.

Anderson provided Hemingway with a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein, another great American writer who happens to be from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and who was living in Paris, France.

Stein immediately was intrigued by Hemingway and introduced him to many other writers living in Paris, a group she termed, the lost generation.

It was this introduction and these connections that sparked Hemingway's interest in moving to Paris, France.

In Paris, Hemingway learned to look at things in a different way.

He experienced a new culture, a new community of friends and acquaintances, and use all of these new found situations to inform his writing.

- [Narrator] The newlywed Hemingway's first real home was a fourth floor walk-up in the Latin quarter.

Each evening, accordion music drifted up from the working man's dance hall next door.

His friend and mentor Sherwood Anderson had persuaded Ernest that for a young writer, Paris was the place to be.

One could live cheaply there.

And the left bank teamed with revolutionary artists and writers from everywhere.

Pablo Picasso and Juan Muro, Igor Stravinsky, and Eric Satie, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein who remembered Paris as the place where the 20th century was.

Ernest was just 22 years old, working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, otherwise unpublished and unknown.

But Sherwood Anderson had written letters of introduction to three influential friends, generously describing him as a quite wonderful newspaper man, whose extraordinary talent was sure to take him far beyond journalism.

- He's tall, he is as handsome as a movie star.

He has dimples, he has a swashbuckling quality to him, but he has this kind of Midwestern sweetness at the same time.

The fact is that if you would walk into a room, people loved him the minute they saw him.

And that gives you a kind of confidence that you can do anything.

- [Narrator] Sherwood Anderson's friends did what they could for the newcomer.

The first was the American expectorate poet Ezra Pound.

He was well connected in avant-garde literary circles and talked Ernest up to every magazine editor he knew.

Gertrude Stein presided over a salon at the home she shared with her partner, Alice B Toklas, art collector, avant-garde writer, champion of modernism in all its forms.

She took a liking to the handsome eager young visitor with what she remembered as dark luminous eyes and the flashing smile.

She liked his terse declarative style too, and offered encouragement and useful advice.

Ms. Stein had discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition, Hemingway remembered, that echoed the counterpoint he'd first encountered in the music of Bach.

Stein also introduced him to the world of modern art.

He was especially drawn to the work of Paul Cezanne, who painted the same subjects over and over again, building up each image from thousands of repetitive brush strokes.

- Cezanne, he's trying to break down normal habits of seeing, and I think that's what Hemingway liked.

The great enemy for Hemingway is boredom, and routine, and anything accustomed.

And I think he saw it and Cezanne a model for taking the same thing over and over landscape, landscape, landscape, the same mountain, the same mountain, and rendering it new by looking at it in different ways, and I think that's the model for him.

- [Narrator] Sylvia Beach became Hemingway's friend too.

She ran Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and lending library at 12 rue de l'Odéon.

- He came into my shop and he had an introduction from Sherwood Anderson, but he didn't give that he'd forgotten to bring it and he didn't need it because I thought he was so interesting.

And he said, "Would you like to see my wounds?"

And I said, "Yes indeed."

And he took off his shoe and his sock, and showed me all these dreadful scars on his leg and foot, and then we became great friends.

- Shakespeare and Company was a gathering place for expatriate artists and writers, Hemingway charmed them all, including the Irish writer, James Joyce, whose daringly explicit novel "Ulysses", Sylvia Beach had just published.

And he set out to educate himself borrowing books from her shop by DH Lawrence, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.

- [Ernest] February 14th, 1922.

We know a good batch of people now in Paris, and if we allowed it would have all our time taken up socially, but I'm working very hard and we keep plenty of time to ourselves.

Paris is so very beautiful, but it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.

- Hemingway time in Paris, amongst established writers was clearly life altering for him as an author and as a man.

Through his many experiences and his writing in Paris, Hemingway became known for looking at simple things, everyday things in different ways.

In fact, much of his writing involved, which is often liken to an iceberg.

A quarter of icebergs are visible above the water, one must look below the surface to discover the majority of the structure.

Thus Hemingway's depiction of characters and situations resembles an iceberg.

He leaves much of their attributes and beliefs under the surface, he wants the reader to discover them.

And what makes Hemingway's writing so unique and so impactful is this concept.

Moving away from Paris, we head to our next location in Hemingway's life, Key West, Florida.

Hemingway first stopped in Key West on a visit home from Paris.

He soon fell in love with the islands charms and the fact that it felt like living in another country.

It was a beautiful place filled with culture and teaming with life.

All of which, Hemingway soaked up happily.

- [Ernest] We have a fine house here and the kids are all well.

Also four raccoons, possum, 18 goldfish, three peacocks, and a yard with fig tree and a lime tree.

♪ All by myself, no one to walk with ♪ ♪ But I'm happy on the shelf - [Narrator] The big antebellum house on Whitehead street in Key West, Florida was a gift from his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer's wealthy uncle Gus, who believed deeply in Hemingway's writing and who would provide financial help to maintain they're expensive and extravagant way of life.

Day-to-day costs were covered by Pauline's trust fund.

Three Hemingway children would soon be seen there.

Jack known as Bumby, the offspring of Hemingway's first marriage spent most of each year with his mother Hadley, who would happily remarry and settle near Chicago.

But he summered in Florida with his father and Pauline.

Patrick, Ernest and Pauline's firstborn called Mouse was in permanent residence.

So was Gregory, nicknamed Giggy, born in 1931.

♪ And his behaving.

- [Narrator] The house on Whitehead street would be Hemingway's comfortable home for the next eight years.

When he was not writing he fished the nearby Gulf stream for tuna and sail fish, mako shark, and blue marlin, refereed boxing matches on Friday night, and hung out in a favorite Key West saloon called Sloppy Joe's.

In Key West, he also maintained the strict writers discipline he had followed since Paris.

(melodious music) - [Ernest] I write every morning, as soon after first light as possible.

There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you're right.

- Hemingway's experiences in Key West were profoundly impactful on his writing.

In Key West not only did he write with intensity at first light each day, as we just discovered, but he also made time for the things he loved.

One of the greatest among them, fishing.

When not sailing the waters on his boat or bringing in record-breaking catches, Hemingway was writing.

His time spent in Key West, saw the publication of his famous works, "A Farewell to Arms" and "Death in the Afternoon", as well as many short stories.

One might even imagine he began to conceptualize the plot for all "The Old Man and the Sea", the story of a fishermen and the biggest catch of his life.

Now next on our travels, we arrive in Spain.

A year after the start of the Spanish civil war, Hemingway left for Spain to cover the war for the American newspaper Alliance.

For Hemingway, Spain was a beautiful country filled with excitement and unique people and culture.

It is here though he found one of his favorite sports, bull fighting.

- [Ernest] I started in Valencia on my 26th birthday, July 21st.

Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.

So I started the book on my birthday, wrote all through the farrier in bed in the morning, went on to Madrid and wrote there.

We had a room with a table and I wrote in great luxury on the table and around the corner from the hotel in a beer place where it was cool.

(vibrant music) - [Narrator] In the summer of 1925, leaving Bumby with a nanny, the Hemingway's returned to Pamplona for the annual running of the bulls.

Afterwards Ernest and Hadley continued to follow the bull fights across Spain, Valencia, Madrid, San Sebastian.

And as they traveled aboard trains and buses on restaurant tables and in hotel rooms at night, he worked feverously on a novel inspired by the turbulent time they'd had with their friends in Pamplona, it would be called "The Sun Also Rises".

The first draft was finished in just eight weeks.

It would be a clear-eyed and sardonic portrait of what Gertrude Stein called, the lost generation, men and women scarred by the great war who did their best to erase its memory.

The narrator, a newspaper man from Kansas city was first named Hym, before he became Jake Barnes.

- [Ernest] Outside a night train running on the street car tracks went by carrying vegetables to the markets.

They were noisy at night when you could not sleep.

Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big arm war beside the bed, of all the ways to be wounded.

- It is obvious not only did Spain spark Hemingway's love of bull fighting, but reporting on the Spanish civil war and traveling through Spain during such a time of conflict and intensity inspired Hemingway's writing.

It was during this time in Spain, that inspired his critically acclaimed novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as well as his only play, "The Fifth Column."

But it was truly experiencing the bull fights that left a mark on Hemingway.

Watching the bullfighters, studying the sport, understanding the importance of this all played in the Spanish culture truly intrigued Hemingway.

Attending bull fights throughout his life led to his celebrated life magazine story, "The Dangerous Summer".

One of his more critically acclaimed stories and one that was born from these unique experiences in Spain.

Now on our travels with Hemingway, we see how impactful exploring and experiencing new places, new cultures, new locations, and new people can be on one's life.

While Hemingway's travels to France, Key West, and Spain, most definitely inspired his famous stories.

We have one more location that left a truly lasting impression on the writer and his stories, and that location is Cuba.

So on our final destination today, we arrive in Cuba.

A country, just 90 miles south of Key West Florida, and the largest island in the Caribbean sea.

Hemingway purchased a home outside of Havana, Cuba, and would live there for 20 years.

He called this home, his lookout farm and shared it with dozens of beloved cats, as well as his trophies from many successful hunts and of course, fishing expeditions.

- [Ernest] People ask you why you live in Cuba and you say, it is because you like it.

It is too complicated to explain about the early morning in the hills above Havana, where every morning is cool and fresh on the hottest day in summer.

You could tell them that you live in Cuba because you only have to put shoes on when you come into town and that you work as well there in those cool early mornings as you ever have worked anyway in the world.

But those are professionals secrets.

- When not fishing or traveling, Hemingway wrote a great deal from his Cuban home.

It was in Cuba that arguably Hemingway greatest story, a Pulitzer prize and Nobel prize winning novella, "The Old Man and the Sea" was written.

It is a simple allegory of an old fishermen who catches the fish of a lifetime, but faces an enormous challenge to bring it back to shore by himself, alone on a boat.

It is a story born from experiences and one that communicates one of Hemingway's most important quotes, "Man is not made for defeat."

Today we visited several countries dear to the writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Countries that taught him valuable lessons, introduced him to unique and exciting experiences and helped inspire his celebrated works of literature.

Because Hemingway looked outside of his box and was not afraid to experience with the world around him, he learned many things, understood many things and became a storyteller who opened the world up for so many, but in an incredibly simplistic and literary way.

While we may or may not be able to travel like Hemingway, we can learn from his experiences, explore new places.

Never fear what you may not understand, rather look at it all as a valuable learning experience.

We are so grateful you joined us on our journey today to the many locations of Hemingway's life.

Thank you.

And remember to not be afraid to engage in your own adventures.

You never know what you do.

(vibrant music)