For Whom the Bell Tolls | Author Biography

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Clarence Edmunds (physician) and Grace (music teacher) Hemingway, both strict Congregationalists. He started writing when he was a teenager, penning a weekly column for his high school newspaper. During this period, he also began to write poems and stories, some of which were published in his school’s literary magazine. After graduating high school in 1917, Hemingway started his career as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, covering city crime and writing feature stories. The position helped him develop a journalistic style, which would later become one of the most identifiable characteristics of his fiction.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway

When World War I broke out, he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. After suffering severe leg injuries, Hemingway met and fell in love with a nurse who would eventually break off their relationship. Disillusioned with the war and with romantic relationships, Hemingway returned home and turned his attention to fiction writing. To support himself, however, he returned to reporting, accepting a position at the Toronto Star.

Like many of his compatriots of the Lost Generation, Hemingway left America for Europe, where he joined the group of literary expatriates in Paris, including Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He lived in Paris for the next seven years, working on his fiction and serving as a European correspondent for American newspapers. From 1937 to 1938, he covered the Spanish Civil War and from 1944 to 1945, he reported on the battles of World War II.

Edward J. O’Brien named Hemingway’s short story “My Old Man,” which appeared in his first publication, Three Stories and Ten Poems, in his list of the best stories of 1923. Hemingway’s next publication, a series of short stories interspersed with vignettes, entitled In Our Time (1924), was well received, and he began to earn a reputation as an astute chronicler of the Lost Generation. This reputation was solidified after the publication of his next story collection, Men Without Women (1927), and the novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). When For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940, it was regarded by the public and the critics as one of his best works.

Along with his growing reputation as one of the most important contemporary American writers, Hemingway developed a mythic persona that he helped perpetuate. During the middle of the century, the public began to envision Hemingway as the personification of his heroes—a hard drinking, forceful American, who could stand his ground on the battlefield, in the boxing ring, and on safari. Several American magazines, such as Life and Esquire, chronicled his adventures. Yet, during this period, he also devoted himself to his craft, which he considered of paramount importance in his life and his time.

During the 1950s, a life of alcohol abuse and rough living took a toll on his health. His health problems, compounded by his three failed marriages and periods of creative stagnation, resulted in a mental breakdown in 1960, and the following year on July 2, Hemingway committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

Hemingway has retained his reputation as one of America’s most significant and influential writers. During his long literary career, he earned several accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, and the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 1954.