Author

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)

 

Was an American author and journalist. He was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His mother, a musician, and his father a physician were both well-respected adults. Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from 1913 to 1917. He played a number a sports –boxing, water polo, track and field, and football. He really stood out in English class where he had excellent grades. In high school he wrote for the school paper and yearbook. Hemingway was a journalist before he became a novelist; after leaving high school he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter.

In early 1918 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I . On his first day in Milan, he was sent to a scene of a munitions factory explosion where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book “Death in the Afternoon”. And on July 8th only two months after he started his job driving ambulances, he was seriously injured by mortar fire, he then returned and started delivering chocolate and cigarettes to the men on the front line. Despite of his wounds, Hemingway carried an Italian soldier to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Metal of Bravery.

Left: Ernest Hemingway was the second child, and first son, born to Clarence and Grace Hemingway.

Right: Hemingway photographed in Milan, 1918, dressed in uniform.

 

 

 

Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. At not yet 20 years old, the war had created in him maturity at odds with living at home without a job and the need for recuperation. That summer he spent time in Michigan with high school friends, fishing and camping; and in September he spent a week in the back-country. The trip became the inspiration for his short story “Big Two-Hearted River”. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto; having nothing else to do he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer, staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. However he returned to Michigan the following June, and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star. Hemingway  married Hadley Richardson on September 3, 1921; two months later Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star; and the couple left for Paris.

During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star.  Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922. The following September, because Hadley was pregnant, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published. Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby), returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into a new apartment on the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. In June 1925, Hemingway and Hadley left Paris for their annual visit to Pamplona accompanied by a group of American and British expatriates. The trip inspired Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which he began to write immediately after the fiesta, finishing in September.

Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on The Sun Also Rises. In the spring of 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, although she endured Pauline’s presence in Pamplona that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley and Hemingway decided to separate; and in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway’s offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises. The couple was divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in May. Pfeiffer was from Arkansas—her family was wealthy and Catholic—and before the marriage Hemingway converted to Catholicism. In Paris she worked for Vogue.  After a honeymoon in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, Hemingway planned his next collection of short stories, Men Without Women, published in October 1927. By the end of the year Pauline, who was pregnant, wanted to move back to America.  So the couple left Paris in March 1928, and moved to Key West, Florida.   

                                                                                                                 

    

In the late spring Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City where their son Patrick Hemingway was born on June 28, 1928.  His third son, Gregory Hancock Hemingway, was born on November 12, 1931 in Kansas City. Pauline’s uncle bought the couple a house in Key West with the second floor of the carriage house converted to a writing den. It was in Christmas 1936 when Hemingway first met war correspondent Martha Gellhorn at a bar in Key West, Florida. In 1937 Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In March he arrived in Spain with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Martha Gellhorn went on to join him in Spain. Like Hadley, Martha as a native of St. Louis, and like Pauline, she had worked for Vogue in Paris. In the spring of 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which had begun when Hemingway met Martha.  Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they almost immediately rented “Finca Vigia” (“Lookout Farm”), a 15-acre property 15 miles from Havana. Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was re-united during a visit to Wyoming. After Hemingway’s divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

During World War II, he was in Europe from June to December 1944. At the D-Day landing, military officials who considered him “precious cargo”, kept him to a landing craft. On December 17, a feverish and ill Hemingway had himself driven to Luxembourg to cover what would later be called The Battle of the Bulge. However, as soon as he arrived, Lanham handed him to the doctors, who hospitalized him with pneumonia, and by the time he recovered a week later, the main fighting was over. In 1947 Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II. When Hemingway initially arrived in England, he met Time magazine correspondent Mary Welsh in London, and was infatuated. Martha—who had been forced to cross the Atlantic in a ship filled with explosives because he refused to help her get a press pass on a plane—arrived in London to find Hemingway hospitalized with a concussion from a car accident. Unsympathetic to his plight, she accused him of being a bully, and told him she was “through, absolutely finished.”  The last time he saw her was in March 1945, as he was preparing to return to Cuba. Meanwhile, he had asked Mary Welsh to marry him on their third meeting.

Hemingway said he “was out of business as a writer” from 1942 to 1945. In 1946 he married Mary, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later. In 1948 Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe. In Italy he returned to the site of his World War I accident, and shortly afterwards began work on Across the River and Into the Trees, which he continued through 1949; it was published in 1950 to bad reviews. The next year he wrote the draft of Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, considering it “the best I can write ever for all of my life”. The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952. Then in October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

From the end of the year in 1955 to early 1956, Hemingway was bedridden. He was told to stop drinking to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but then disregarded. Although Hemingway’s mental deterioration was noticeable in the summer of 1960, he again traveled to Spain to obtain photographs for a manuscript. When he left Spain, he went straight to Idaho, but was worried about money and his safety. As his paranoia increased, he believed the FBI was actively monitoring his movements. Hemingway suffered from physical problems as well: his health declined and his eyesight was failing. In November he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he may have believed he was to be treated for hypertension.

Three months later, back in Ketchum, Idaho, Mary found Hemingway holding a shotgun one morning. Two days later, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway “quite deliberately” shot himself with his favorite shotgun. He unlocked the gun cabinet, went to the front entrance of their Ketchum home, and “pushed two shells into the twelve-gauge Boss shotgun, put the end of the barrel into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains.”  Mary called the Sun Valley Hospital, and Dr. Scott Earle arrived at the house within “fifteen minutes”. Despite his finding that Hemingway “had died of a self-inflicted wound to the head”, the story told to the press was that the death had been “accidental”.

During his final years, Hemingway’s behavior was similar to his father’s before he himself committed suicide; his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirm that Hemingway’s hemochromatosis had been diagnosed in early 1961. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide. Added to Hemingway’s physical ailments was the additional problem that he had been a heavy drinker for most of his life. Hemingway’s family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, which was officiated by the local Catholic priest who believed the death accidental. In a press interview five years later Mary Hemingway admitted her husband had committed suicide.

Ernest and Mary Hemingway are buried in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho.