Hills Like White Elephants | Author Biography

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, to Clarence and Grace Hemingway. His father was a doctor and his mother a musician who had given up her career to care for the couple’s six children.

Hemingway’s early life was an upper-middle class, comfortable existence. He and his family spent summers at their cottage in northern Michigan. He graduated from high school and went to work as a reporter, a career he continued on and off for the rest of his life.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway

The comfortable life ended, however, in 1918 when Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver to do service on the front lines of World War I in Europe. While in Italy, just before his nineteenth birthday, he was severely wounded while helping to rescue another wounded man. The experiences that Hemingway had in the war and during his recuperation stayed with him for the rest of his life, impacting his work greatly.

After the war, Hemingway returned to his work as a reporter. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, and the couple moved to Paris. There he developed connections with other expatriate writers, including Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein among others. He also met and established a friendship with James Joyce. Throughout this period, he continued to work as a correspondent while launching his own literary career.

In 1926, Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, which generated considerable critical attention. The novel firmly established Hemingway as the voice of his generation, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘‘lost generation.’’ He continued to meet with success in publishing his short stories. In 1927, he and his first wife divorced, and he married Pauline Pfeiffer. In that same year, he published the well-received collection of short stories, Men Without Women, a collection that included the short story, ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants.’’

In the years that followed, the Hemingways established a household in Key West, Florida. In 1929, Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms was published. Hemingway’s fame continued to grow, but not only for his literary skill—his ‘‘extracurricular’’ activities placed him squarely in the public eye. He hunted big game in Africa in the 1930s and German submarines in the Caribbean in the 1940s, and after covering the Spanish Civil War as a reporter, he memorialized the Loyalist cause in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

By 1940, Hemingway had moved to Cuba and married his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. He subsequently divorced Gellhorn and married Mary Welsh in 1946. In 1952, he published The Old Man and the Sea, for which he was awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hemingway’s final years were filled with growing physical and mental pain. In 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, he took his own life with a shotgun blast, ending a decades-long literary career and a life filled with both the highest adventure and the deepest depression. His work continues to generate immense critical and popular interest.