【正文】 ul, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black w ith rain. The vineyards were thin and barebranched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the truc ks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes。 he is now the richest man in America, and he39。t get good grades, you won39。 their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridgeboxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast。s still in his 30s. There is a baseba ll pitcher who makes more than $4 million a year even though he has been labeled `mentally challenged.39。s most popular wor k, _The O ld Man and the Sea_, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful, styleforming mastery of the art of narration. One of the most important influences on the development of the short story and nove l in American fiction, Hemingway has seized the imagination of the American public like no other twentiethcentury author. He died, by suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. H is other works include _The Torrents of Spring_ (1926), _Winner Ta ke Nothing_ (1933), _To Have and Have Not_ (1937), _The Fifth Column and the First Forty Nine Stories_ (1938), _Across the River and into the Trees_ (1950), and posthumously, _A Moveable Feast_ (1964), _Islands in the Stream_ (1970), _The Dangerous Summer_ (1985), and _The Garden of Eden_ (1986). Does school prepare children for the real world? Study hard and get good grades and you will find a highpaying job with great benefits, my parents used to say. Their goal in life was to provide a college education for my older sister and me, so that we would have the greatest chance for success in life. When T finally earned my diploma in 1976graduating with honors, and near the top of my class, in accounting from Florida State University my parents had realized their goal. It was the crowning achievement of their lives. In accordance with the Master Plan, I was hired by a Big 8 accounting f irm, and I looked forward to a long career and retirement at an early age. My husband, Michael, followed a similar path. We both came from hardworking families, of modest means but w ith strong wor k ethics. Michael also graduated with honors, but he did it tw ice: first as an engineer and then from law school. He was quickly recruited by a prestigious Washington, ., law firm that specialized in patent law, and his future seemed bright, career path welldefined and early retirement guaranteed. Although we have been successful in our careers, they have not turned out quite as we expected. We both have changed positions several timesfor all the right reasonsbut there are no pension plans vesting on our behalf. Our retirement funds are growing only through our individual contributions. Michael and I have a w onderful marriage with three great children. As I write this, two are in college and one is just beginning high school. We have spent a fortune making sure our children have received the best education available. One day in 1996, one of my children came home disillusioned with school. He was bored and tired of studying. Why should I put time into studying subjects I will never use in real life? he protested. Without thinking, I responded, Because if you don39。 usually there was an officer on the seat w ith the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the bac k was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow bac k, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly. At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army. ERNEST HEMINGWAY was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career for _The Kansas City Star_ in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the infantry. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His first book, _Three Stories and Ten Poems_, wa s published in Paris in 1923 and was followed by the short story selection _In Our Time_, which marked his American debut in 1925. With the appearance of _The Sun Also Rises_ in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the lost generation but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed by _Men Without Women_ in 1927, when Hemingway returned to the United States, and his novel of the Italian front, _A Farewell to Arms_ (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely to Spain, Italy, and Africaand wrote about his experiences in _Death in the Afternoon_ (1932), his classic treatise on bullfighting, and _Green Hills of Africa_ (1935), an account of biggame hunting in Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1939), hunted Uboats in the Caribbean, and covered the E uropean front during the Second World War. Hemingway39。 There was a long silence between