From The New American Desk Encyclopedia 1989: HEMINGWAY, Ernest (1899-1961)... His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises chronicled the postwar experiences of what his friend Gertrude Stein called the "lost generation" of WWI....

LOST GENERATION, a term for the U.S. writers of the post-WWI generation, coined in a remark by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway. Besides him they included Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and others. Their ideals shattered by the war, they felt alienated from the materialism of America in the 1920's, and many lived bohemian expatriate lives in Paris.

From MAGILL: Masterpieces of World Literature 1989, pp. 295 and 298: A Farewell to Arms: "This story of a tragic love affair is set on the Italian front during World War I. Hemingway tells his tale with an abundance of realistic detail. Rather than a celebration of the "triumph of victory and agony of defeat," the author's vision is uncompromisingly disillusioned. Not only is war useless, but efforts to maintain any meaningful relationship with individuals in the modern world are equally doomed. (In A Farewell to Arms) all...fail in the end. Religion is only for others, patriotism is a sham, hedonism becomes boring, culture is a temporary distraction, work finally fails...even love cannot last. All that remains is a stoic acceptance of the above facts with dignity and without bitterness. Life, like war, is absurd....There is no guarantee that the luck ever balances out and, since everyone ultimately dies, it probably doesn't matter. What does matter is the courage, dignity, and style which one accepts these facts as a basis for life, and more important, in the face of death."

pg. 608: Old Man and the Sea: "The typical Hemingway hero, existential in a peculiarly American way, faces the sterility and failure and death of his contemporary world with steady-handed courage and a stoical resistance to pain that allows him a fleeting, but essentially human, nobility and grace....As a kind of ultimate condensation of the Hemingway code, this short novel attains an austere dignity. Its extreme simplicity of imagery, symbolism, setting, and character stands in stark contrast with the epic sprawl of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"-a work with which it nevertheless has much in common....Hemingway's realism does not present the struggle (between the old man and the marlin) as a pseudosacred cosmic one between forces of darkness but as an everyday confrontation between the strength of an ordinary man and the power of nature."

&laqno; I found the above sentence particularly significant for "Hills Like White Elephants." Since Hemingway's marlin represented nature, I looked at "Hills" to see if the hills like white elephants might also represent nature and the confrontation with it.