A Clean, Well-Lighted Place | Author Biography

Ernest Hemingway will always be associated with the dynamic group of artists known as the “modernists” whose ideas set the European continent on fire in the first decades of this century. These artists came from many countries, and many of them, like Hemingway, honed their art and thought in Paris in the 1920s.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. By all accounts, he enjoyed a secure and unexceptional youth. His first taste of Europe came, at the age of eighteen (1918), when he volunteered to drive an ambulance in Italy during World War I (1914-1918 known as the “Great War’’). He was wounded in Italy, and once he had recovered, he returned to the U.S.

He began his writing career as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, but soon interested himself in fiction. He befriended the writer Sherwood Anderson who gave him letters of introduction to important writers in Paris. 1921 found him with his letters of introduction, and his first wife, sailing for the continent where he would socialize with, or learn from the likes of Gertrude Stein F. Scott Fitzgerald James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. Metropolitan, especially European, capital cities were bustling with artists in the 1920s, and this was why Paris was Hemingway’s destination. These artists were restless war exiles (WWI) and other expatriates who espoused dramatic new ways of thinking accompanied by dramatic new styles in representation. Expatriates like Hemingway were self-styled internationalists in order to deplore the national borders and colonial politics that had caused the war conflict.

Hemingway’s time in Europe confirmed his decision to be, first and foremost, a fiction writer, even though he never gave up writing journalism and other nonfiction. This time also confirmed his life-long attachment to Spain, its traditions, and peoples, and once he had returned to the states for good, he spent much time in other Latin enclaves (Southern Florida and Cuba). Indeed, he wrote about Spanish and Latin American subjects throughout his career, as in the short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” And although after the 1920s he never again lived exclusively in Europe, he traveled around the world constantly until his death (Africa was a favorite destination).

Hemingway was a prolific writer who schooled himself relentlessly. He produced a large body of short stories, much journalism and nonfiction, a few novellas, and a series of novels. He never lost interest in news reportage and covered many world conflicts, including the devastating Spanish Civil War which began in 1936. His personal life was adventurous and privileged. Financially comfortable thanks to his writing, his fame, or perhaps a wealthy wife (he married four times), Hemingway was able to cultivate his sporting passions expansively (big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing).

Ernest Hemingway wrote, hunted, sailed, traveled, and drank himself through a hectically muscular life. He seems to have been a driven man, and whatever propelled him finally led him to choose suicide as a means to die, in 1961. Hemingway suicided like his father before him, and one of his daughters after him. Before this sad event, however, he secured himself a central place in American letters and lore. His renown and reputation was such, in fact, that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.