Ernest Hemingway

Based on Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway

The Wounded Boy Who Wrote Like No One Else

Ernest Hemingway was eighteen years old when a mortar shell exploded near him on the Italian front in 1918. He had been handing out chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers in the trenches—not fighting, just volunteering as an ambulance driver because his bad eyesight kept him out of the real army. The shrapnel tore into both his legs. Despite his wounds, he helped carry Italian soldiers to safety before collapsing himself.

That night changed everything.

"When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality," Hemingway later said. "Other people get killed; not you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."

He spent six months recovering in a Milan hospital, falling in love with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky who was seven years older than him. He went home to America believing she would follow and marry him. Instead, she sent a letter announcing her engagement to an Italian officer. The rejection, according to his biographers, scarred him so deeply that he spent the rest of his life leaving women before they could leave him first.

From this wounded teenager emerged one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century—a man who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature, revolutionize American prose, and become as famous for his adventurous life as for his spare, muscular sentences.

Growing Up in Good-People Country

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who also lived there, once quipped that it had "so many churches for so many good people to go to."

His father Clarence was a physician. His mother Grace was a musician who taught young Ernest to play the cello—lessons he claimed to hate at the time but later credited with shaping his prose. The "contrapuntal structure" of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, he said, owed something to those reluctant hours with the instrument.

Grace Hemingway had peculiar ideas about raising children. Following Victorian conventions that didn't differentiate clothing by gender, she kept Ernest's hair long and dressed him in frilly feminine clothes to match his older sister Marcelline, wanting the two to appear as twins. This lasted until he was three years old.

Ernest's real education happened during summers at the family cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. There his father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods. These weren't casual hobbies. They became a lifelong passion—an almost spiritual need for wild places and physical adventure that would take him to bullfights in Spain, safaris in Africa, and deep-sea fishing off Cuba.

The Kansas City Style Guide

In high school, Hemingway boxed, played football and water polo, and edited both the newspaper and the yearbook. He contributed sports writing under the pseudonym "Ring Lardner Jr."—a tribute to the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Ring Lardner, whose byline was "Line O'Type."

After graduation, he went to work as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. He stayed only six months, but those months shaped everything that followed.

The Star had a style guide. It read: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

That style guide became the foundation of Hemingway's prose. Strip away the adjectives. Cut the adverbs. Say what you mean and stop talking. This approach—spare, declarative, trusting the reader to fill in emotional meaning—would influence generations of writers who came after him.

Coming Home Broken

When Hemingway returned from the war in January 1919, he was not yet twenty years old. He had nearly lost his legs. He had lost his illusion of immortality. And soon he would lose the woman he loved.

His parents couldn't understand what had happened to their son. As biographer Michael S. Reynolds explains, "Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee." He couldn't describe being in a foreign hospital, unable to understand the surgeons discussing whether to amputate his leg.

He had no job. He needed to recuperate. He was living at home in wholesome Oak Park, but his mind was still in the trenches.

That September, he went on a fishing and camping trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula with high school friends. This trip later became the basis for his short story "Big Two-Hearted River," in which a young man named Nick Adams—one of Hemingway's most autobiographical characters—goes into the wilderness seeking solitude after coming home from war. In the story, Nick focuses intensely on the small rituals of making camp and catching trout. The war is never mentioned. But the reader feels its weight in every careful, controlled gesture.

Paris and the Lost Generation

In 1920, Hemingway moved to Chicago and began working as a writer for the Toronto Star. There he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, who would change the course of his life.

He also met Hadley Richardson, a red-haired woman eight years his senior with what one biographer called a "nurturing instinct." Hemingway claimed he knew immediately she was the girl he would marry. They were married in September 1921.

The young couple wanted to travel to Europe. They were thinking of Rome. But Anderson convinced them to go to Paris instead, giving them letters of introduction to the writers and artists who lived there.

Anderson suggested Paris because it was inexpensive and because, he said, it was where "the most interesting people in the world" resided.

He wasn't exaggerating.

Hemingway and Hadley moved into a small walk-up apartment in the Latin Quarter. The writer Gertrude Stein became Hemingway's mentor and the godmother to his son. At her salon, he met Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and other painters who were reinventing visual art just as he was learning to reinvent prose.

Stein coined a phrase for the American and British expatriates who had gathered in Paris, young people disillusioned by the war and searching for meaning. She called them the "Lost Generation." Hemingway would make the term famous by using it as an epigraph in his first novel.

Through a chance meeting at Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Hemingway also befriended the poet Ezra Pound, who was fourteen years older and had just finished editing T.S. Eliot's landmark poem The Waste Land. Pound introduced Hemingway to the Irish novelist James Joyce, with whom Hemingway frequently went on what he delicately called "alcoholic sprees."

The Lost Suitcase

During his first twenty months in Paris, Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent, filing eighty-eight stories for the Toronto Star. He covered the Greco-Turkish War and witnessed the burning of the city of Smyrna. He wrote travel pieces about tuna fishing in Spain and trout fishing across Europe.

But his real work—the fiction he wrote in a rented room near his apartment—almost never reached the world.

In December 1922, Hadley was traveling to meet Hemingway in Geneva. At the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, someone stole her suitcase. Inside it were nearly all of her husband's manuscripts—his short stories, his novel-in-progress, even the carbon copies.

Years of work, gone.

Hemingway was devastated and furious. Only three stories survived: two that had already been sent out for publication, and one he wrote early in 1923 while visiting Italy.

These three stories became the core of his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, published in Paris in 1923. A small volume of vignettes called in our time—printed without capitals—followed shortly after. Many of these brief sketches came from his first visit to Spain, where he had discovered bullfighting and become obsessed with it.

The Sun Also Rises

The Hemingways returned to Paris in 1924 with their infant son John—nicknamed Bumby—and settled into an apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Hemingway helped edit The Transatlantic Review, which published work by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, as well as Hemingway's own early stories.

His story "Indian Camp" appeared and received considerable praise. Critics said Hemingway was reinvigorating the short-story genre with his crisp style and declarative sentences.

That same year, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had just published The Great Gatsby. The two formed a complicated friendship characterized by what biographers describe as "admiration and hostility." Hemingway read Fitzgerald's novel, admired it, and decided his next work had to be a novel too.

For inspiration, he looked to Spain.

Hemingway had first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona in 1923 and had become fascinated by bullfighting. He returned in 1924, and again in June 1925, this time bringing a group of American and British expatriate friends. The group included his Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, the recently divorced Lady Duff Twysden, her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.

The trip was a disaster of romantic entanglements and drunken arguments.

It was also perfect material.

A few days after the fiesta ended, on his twenty-sixth birthday, Hemingway began writing. Eight weeks later, he had finished the first draft of The Sun Also Rises.

The novel follows a group of disillusioned expatriates—clearly based on the Pamplona trip—as they drink heavily, fall in and out of love, and watch bullfights. The narrator, Jake Barnes, has been wounded in the war in a way that has left him impotent. The woman he loves, Lady Brett Ashley, is based on Duff Twysden.

When the book was published in 1926, it made Hemingway famous. It also made "Lost Generation" a household phrase and established bullfighting as a subject worthy of serious literary attention.

The Pattern Begins

While Hemingway was revising The Sun Also Rises during a winter stay in Austria, a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer came to visit. She was the daughter of a wealthy Catholic family from Arkansas and worked for Vogue magazine in Paris.

Hadley didn't like her.

Pauline encouraged Hemingway to sign with the prestigious publisher Scribner's. When Hemingway traveled to New York to meet with editors, he stopped in Paris on his way back and began an affair with Pauline.

The pattern his biographers had identified—leaving before he could be left—was taking shape. Hemingway would marry four times. The first three marriages ended when he fell in love with his next wife while still married to the current one.

The Iceberg Theory

What made Hemingway's writing so distinctive? He developed what critics later called the "iceberg theory" of prose.

The idea is simple but revolutionary: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. In writing, this means leaving out everything that can be left out. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he can omit things and the reader will feel them anyway—will feel them more strongly, in fact, than if they had been stated directly.

Consider how Hemingway handles death and grief. He rarely describes emotions explicitly. Instead, he describes physical actions and objects with careful precision. The emotion emerges from what is not said.

This technique was the opposite of the florid, adjective-heavy Victorian prose that preceded him. It was also different from the stream-of-consciousness experiments of writers like Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Hemingway's sentences were short and clear. His vocabulary was simple. His dialogue sounded like real people talking.

And underneath that simplicity was everything he chose not to say.

War, Again

In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. The conflict was a proxy battle between fascism and democracy, with Hitler and Mussolini supporting the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco while the Soviet Union backed the Republican government.

The experience gave him material for For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940. The novel follows an American volunteer fighting with Republican guerrillas who is assigned to blow up a bridge. It became one of Hemingway's most acclaimed works.

During World War II, Hemingway was present as a journalist—though he pushed the boundaries of what journalists were supposed to do—at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He attached himself to a unit of Free French fighters and allegedly led armed resistance activities, technically violating the Geneva Conventions' rules about noncombatant journalists.

By this point, Hemingway had moved to Cuba, where he lived at a property called Finca Vigía—Lookout Farm—outside Havana. He loved Cuba: the fishing, the drinking, the tropical weather. He would live there, off and on, for more than twenty years.

The Old Man and the Sea

By the early 1950s, some critics thought Hemingway was finished. His novel Across the River and into the Trees, published in 1950, received harsh reviews.

Then came The Old Man and the Sea.

Published in 1952, this short novel tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. He sails out alone into the Gulf Stream and hooks an enormous marlin. For three days, the old man struggles to bring in the fish, which is larger than his boat.

He finally succeeds, but on the journey home, sharks attack the marlin. By the time Santiago reaches harbor, only the skeleton remains.

The novel is Hemingway's iceberg theory in its purest form. On the surface, it's a simple fishing story. Underneath, it's about endurance, pride, defeat, and the relationship between hunter and prey. The prose is stripped down to its essence.

The Old Man and the Sea received enormous critical and popular acclaim. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was specifically cited when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

The Crashes

In early 1954, Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary went on safari in Africa. During a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo, their plane struck an abandoned telegraph wire and crashed.

They survived, but when they chartered another plane the next day to seek medical help, that plane also crashed—this time catching fire on the runway.

Hemingway kicked open a jammed door with his head and escaped the burning wreckage. The injuries from these two crashes were severe: a ruptured liver and kidney, a dislocated shoulder, a cracked skull, burns, and a concussion that left him leaking cerebral fluid from his ear.

He never fully recovered.

For the remaining seven years of his life, Hemingway was in near-constant pain. He developed high blood pressure and liver problems. His mental health deteriorated. He became increasingly paranoid, convinced at times that the FBI was following him. (Decades later, Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that he was right—the FBI had maintained a file on him since the 1940s.)

The End

By 1960, Hemingway could barely write. He had been working on a memoir of his Paris years—eventually published posthumously as A Moveable Feast—but struggled to complete even simple sentences. His memory was failing. He was hospitalized multiple times and received electroconvulsive therapy, which may have made his memory problems worse.

On July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway died by suicide. He was sixty-one years old.

His father had also died by suicide, as would his sister Ursula and his brother Leicester. His granddaughter Margaux would take her own life as well. Whether this reflected a genetic predisposition to depression, the accumulated trauma of a violent and eventful life, or both, biographers continue to debate.

What Remains

Hemingway published seven novels, six short story collections, and two book-length works of nonfiction during his lifetime. Several more books appeared after his death, including A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and The Garden of Eden.

But his influence extends far beyond his own bibliography. The spare, declarative style he developed—use short sentences, use vigorous English, be positive not negative—became the dominant mode of American prose in the twentieth century. Writers as different as Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion show his influence.

He also became a cultural figure in a way few writers ever do. The adventurous lifestyle—the bullfights, the African safaris, the deep-sea fishing, the wars—was inseparable from the work. Hemingway didn't just write about masculinity and courage and physical endurance; he lived those values, or at least performed them with enough conviction that the performance became indistinguishable from reality.

The wounded eighteen-year-old who lost his illusion of immortality spent the rest of his life testing himself against death. He sought out danger, documented it in prose stripped to its essential elements, and in doing so created a new way of writing about what it means to be human.

Whether that was courage or compulsion—whether he was running toward something or away from it—remains, like so much in Hemingway's work, beneath the surface of the water.