Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a conservative suburb west of Chicago. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a physician; his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a trained musician who gave voice lessons. He was the second of six children ^[1].

Summers at the family cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan shaped him more than the classroom did. There he learned to fish, hunt, and camp with his father, and the woods and lakes of that region later supplied the settings for many of his Nick Adams stories ^[2].

At Oak Park and River Forest High School he wrote for the student newspaper and yearbook, boxed, and played football. He skipped college. In 1917, at seventeen, he took a job as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, where the paper's style sheet demanded short sentences, short first paragraphs, and vigorous English. He later credited those rules as the best training a young writer could get ^[1].

Rejected by the army because of poor eyesight, Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War. On July 8, 1918, while distributing supplies to soldiers near the Piave River at Fossalta, he was badly wounded by an Austrian mortar shell. He was eighteen ^[3].

He spent months recovering in a Milan hospital, where he fell in love with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. She ended the relationship by letter after he returned home, an experience that fed directly into A Farewell to Arms a decade later ^[3].

Back in North America he wrote features for the Toronto Star, and in 1921 he married Hadley Richardson. The couple moved to Paris, where he covered European affairs for the Star while teaching himself to write fiction. Sherwood Anderson had supplied letters of introduction, and in Paris Hemingway came to know Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the circle of expatriates Stein famously called a lost generation ^[4].

Hemingway's first significant book, In Our Time (1925), interleaved short stories with terse vignettes of war and bullfighting. Reviewers noticed the new manner at once: declarative sentences, hard concrete nouns, and emotion conveyed by what was left out. He described this method as the iceberg principle, in which the dignity of a story's movement depends on the seven-eighths hidden underwater ^[2].

The Sun Also Rises (1926) made his reputation. Drawn from a trip to the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona with a group of friends, the novel followed damaged expatriates drifting between Paris and Spain, and it became a defining portrait of the postwar generation ^[4].

A Farewell to Arms (1929), a love story set against the Italian front he knew firsthand, confirmed him as a major novelist and gave him his first commercial success. By his early thirties, Hemingway's style was already being imitated across American journalism and fiction ^[1].

Anyone asking what Ernest Hemingway achievements amount to can start with the books of his middle years. Death in the Afternoon (1932) treated Spanish bullfighting as both craft and tragedy. Green Hills of Africa (1935) recounted a safari in Tanganyika. His short stories of the 1930s, among them The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, are counted among the finest in the language ^[2].

Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, siding openly with the Republic. Out of that war came For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the story of an American dynamiter with a guerrilla band in the Sierra de Guadarrama. It sold in the hundreds of thousands within months and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize ^[5].

During the Second World War he reported for Collier's, was present off Omaha Beach on D-Day, and attached himself to American infantry units advancing through France, including the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest. In 1947 he received a Bronze Star for his war reporting ^[3].

The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short novel about an aged Cuban fisherman's battle with a giant marlin, restored his standing after the poorly received Across the River and into the Trees. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for his mastery of the art of narrative and for the influence of his style on contemporary prose ^[6].

Hemingway married four times. His marriage to Hadley Richardson, with whom he had a son, John, ended in 1927 after his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion journalist he married that year. He and Pauline had two sons, Patrick and Gregory, and lived for years in Key West, Florida, where their house is now a museum ^[7].

His third wife was the writer and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whom he met in Key West and married in 1940; the marriage broke apart during the Second World War, in part over professional rivalry. In 1946 he married Mary Welsh, a journalist he had met in London, and she remained his wife until his death ^[3].

From 1939 he made his main home at Finca Vigia, a hillside farm outside Havana, Cuba, where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea and fished the Gulf Stream aboard his boat, the Pilar. The property is preserved today as a Cuban museum ^[8].

The public image, boxer, hunter, deep-sea fisherman, drinker, was partly of his own making, and friends called him Papa. Behind it lay repeated physical trauma: wartime wounds, car crashes, and in January 1954 two small-plane crashes in two days in East Africa that left him with a fractured skull, internal injuries, and burns. Some newspapers, believing him dead, printed obituaries he later read with grim amusement ^[1].

The injuries from the African crashes never fully healed, and Hemingway's health declined through the late 1950s. High blood pressure, liver damage from decades of heavy drinking, and deepening depression made sustained work difficult. He labored over several long manuscripts, including the memoir of his Paris years eventually published as A Moveable Feast ^[3].

After the Cuban Revolution he left Finca Vigia in 1960 and settled in Ketchum, Idaho. That year he was twice admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was treated for depression and paranoia and received electroconvulsive therapy, which he complained had ruined his memory and with it his ability to write ^[1].

On the morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound at his home in Ketchum, nineteen days before his sixty-second birthday. His father had also died by suicide, in 1928, and several other members of the family died the same way in later generations. He was buried in the Ketchum cemetery ^[1].

Few writers have altered a language's prose the way Hemingway did. His compression, his refusal of ornament, and his trust in the reader became a standard that generations of novelists and journalists absorbed, whether they imitated him or wrote against him. Critics from his own lifetime onward have ranked him with the central figures of American modernism ^[2].

Publication did not stop with his death. Mary Hemingway and his publishers issued A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), and other works assembled from his papers, each renewing debate about his methods and his private preoccupations. His manuscripts and letters are held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the largest Hemingway collection in the world ^[9].

Among basic Ernest Hemingway facts, the physical traces of the life are unusually well kept: his Oak Park birthplace, the Key West house, Finca Vigia outside Havana, and the Ketchum grave all draw visitors, and Pamplona still trades on his name each July. For readers who ask who was Ernest Hemingway, the short answer remains the one his Nobel citation implied: the writer who taught the twentieth century a new way to put a sentence together ^[6].