Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose spare, understated prose helped shape later 20th-century writing. Born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, he grew up in a well-educated family in an affluent suburb west of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician. Hemingway became known not only for his books, but also for an adventurous life and a blunt public image that made him one of the most talked-about writers of his era.

Hemingway’s early years gave him several of the habits and interests that later entered his work. His mother taught him cello, which he later said contributed to his writing style, including the “contrapuntal structure” of For Whom the Bell Tolls. His father taught him woodcraft during family summers at Windemere on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, where he learned to hunt, fish, and camp. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, he competed in sports, played in the orchestra, and edited the school newspaper and yearbook. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, whose style guide urged short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English, and a positive rather than negative approach. That advice became a foundation for his prose.

World War I marked Hemingway deeply. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected because of poor eyesight, then volunteered as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross Motor Corps in Italy. In 1918, at age 18, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire after bringing chocolate and cigarettes to men at the front line. Despite his injuries, he helped Italian soldiers to safety and received the Italian War Merit Cross and the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor. He later wrote that war stripped away a young man’s “illusion of immortality.” His wartime experience supplied material for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.

In 1921, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. There he was influenced by the modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community. His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, appeared in 1926. In 1928 he returned to the United States and settled in Key West, Florida. He later went to Spain in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, which became the basis for For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940 and written in Havana, Cuba. During World War II, he was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

Hemingway published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two works of non-fiction; some became classics of American literature. The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, was received with considerable acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. That same year, on a trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane crashes, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. He died by suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. His words still hold readers because they are direct, controlled, and hard-earned, shaped by reporting, war, travel, injury, and a lifelong attention to what people do when faced with danger, loss, and pressure.