Ernest Hemingway’s life of adventure and creativity was as intense as his work. A war reporter, novelist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Old Man and the Sea, he is remembered as one of the leading lights of 20th-century American literature.
The eldest son of Clarence Edmunds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall, a musically talented mother, Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, U.S.A. The family frequented a lake in northern Michigan called Lake Wirral, whose wilderness was a major factor in inspiring Hemingway’s literary sensibilities as a child. His first short story collection, “In Our Time,” reflects those boyhood experiences.
In 1913, he enrolled at Oak Park High School, where he began to excel in sports and literature. He participated in the student newspaper and wrote short stories, albeit rudimentary ones, that reflected the issues of nature and violence that he would enjoy addressing throughout his life.
In April 1917, the United States entered World War I. Ernest, who had graduated from high school that year, wanted to join the war effort by being drafted, but over his father’s staunch objections, he took a job at The Kansas City Star newspaper, where he was given the opportunity to take formal writing lessons. Unable to suppress his burning desire to serve, Hemingway was finally assigned to the Italian front the following year as a second lieutenant in the Red Cross wounded carrier corps. A month later, he encountered war for the first time in the suburbs of Milan, and on his subsequent tour of duty in northern Italy, he was severely wounded in the leg, a situation he described with some degree of realism in A Farewell to Arms.
Upon his discharge from the army in January 1919, Hemingway returned to New York City and became a temporary reporter for the Star Weekly in Turonto, Canada, where he had the opportunity to take formal writing lessons. He returned to Chicago that fall, where he became acquainted with the established literary community during the Chicago Literary Revival, and it was fortunate for his literary aspirations that he became close to Sherwood Anderson. When Hemingway married his first wife, Hudley Richardson, and traveled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for Star Weekly, Anderson’s letters of introduction put him in touch with the world’s leading writers, poets, and critics who were gathering in Paris at the time.
While in Paris, he socialized with leading literary figures such as James Joyce, and received literary guidance, especially from Gertrude Stein and the poet Ezra Pound, who were instrumental in teaching him the rigors of concise sentences.
With the publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923, he broke off his association with the newspaper in Toronto and began to write full-time, followed by In Our Time in 24. The following year, he published The Torrents of Spring, which depicted the dark violence and inner world of bullfighting, war, and murder, and in 26, he published his first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises, which caused a great sensation and established his reputation as a writer.
In January 1927, he officially divorced his wife of more than a year, and returned to the United States that summer to remarry Poeline Pfeiffer, who was in Paris as a correspondent for Vogue magazine.
He began work on A Farewell to Arms in early 1928, completing it in six months. This second novel was serialized in Scribner’s magazine the following year, 1929, and then published in paperback in late September, selling over 80,000 copies in just four months of publication. It was later dramatized and performed on stage, and in 1932 it was made into a movie.
In the summer of 1931, he wrote Death in the Afternoon, based on his experiences on a trip to Spain, and then went on a hunting trip to East Africa, from which he published a collection of accounts entitled The Green Hills of Africa.
He used his experiences from this trip to write one of his most iconic short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. It is the most autobiographical of Hemingway’s works.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, Hemingway resumed his active career and was applauded by left-wingers in the name of the anti-fascist struggle. The uprising ended in victory for the fascists, and it was shortly thereafter that Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, which was completed and published in October 1940 and sold more than half a million copies by April of the following year.
After completing the work, he divorced his second wife, married fellow writer Murder Galhón, whom he had met in Madrid, bought a mansion near Havana, and began his third marriage.
When World War II broke out in September 1939 and the United States entered the war, Hemingway traveled to Europe again as a correspondent and participated in the famous D-Day landings. After returning from a year in the service, he divorced Murder the following December and married Mary Welsh.
His middle novel, The Old Man and the Sea, was subsequently published in 1952 to widespread critical acclaim.
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of an old fisherman living off the coast of Cuba who goes out to sea and spots a whale bigger than his fishing boat, fights it for two days and nights, finally catches it and brings it home, only to find it attacked by a school of sharks at dawn, leaving him skull and bones. It’s a simple story, but it has infinite meaning, and somehow symbolizes the creative struggle of an artist. The old fisherman is an indomitable human being who never lost his courage and faith in the face of all kinds of hardships and adversity.
Hemingway went on a hunting trip to Africa in the summer of 1953, and in ’54, he suffered an unfortunate plane crash that left him with a fractured skull and damaged internal organs. His health rapidly deteriorated, and although he was awarded the Nobel Prize that year for The Old Man and the Sea, he was unable to attend the ceremony.
Hemingway, who had moved from Cuba to Ketcham, Idaho, in the spring of 1960, ended his life on July 2, 1961, by shooting himself in the head with his favorite shotgun. His funeral was held in Ketcham on July 6, and his remains were buried on a small hill north of Ketcham.
