Dec 20, 2009
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. He was the second son of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, who had been an aspiring opera singer. While his father encouraged his son’s athletic and outdoor skills, his mother fostered her son’s artistic talents. In school, Hemingway was an active, if not outstanding, athlete. He wrote poems and articles for the school newspaper, and he also tried his hand at stories. After graduation Hemingway became a reporter on the Kansas City Star, where he learned the newspaper’s preferred style of simple declarative sentences that was to permanently influence his own style of writing.
In May of 1918 Hemingway volunteered for duty in World War I serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. This experience later served as the source material for A Farewell to Arms. He, like the novel’s protagonist, was wounded in the legs. However, instead of being returned to the front he was sent home, where he was greeted as a celebrity. He spent months convalescing at the family cabin in Michigan. Having recovered, in 1920, Hemingway moved to Toronto where he functioned as companion to a disabled youth. There, he again entered the world of writing by working for the Toronto Star. After marrying, he became a correspondent with the paper. His position enabled him to begin pursuing a career as a novelist. He and his wife, Hadley Richardson, left for Paris, where Hemingway associated with a group of other authors known collectively as the “Lost Generation.” The group included James Joyce Ezra Pound Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford.
Awaiting the birth of their child, the Hemingways returned to Toronto in 1923. Following the birth of their son John, the family went back to Paris. There Hemingway spent a year and a half editing a literary magazine. 1925 to 1929 proved to be a prolific period for Hemingway, who wrote and published the short story collection In Our Time and the novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, as well as others. The end of the 1920s was marred, however, by his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and by the suicide of his father in 1928. In the same period, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom Hemingway married the same year as his divorce, nearly died while she was giving birth to their child. This experience later found its way into the death of the character Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
The 1930s, on the other hand, were filled with writing and adventure, as Hemingway hunted in Africa, fished in the Gulf Stream near Cuba, and reported on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. During the mid-1930s Hemingway began gathering material for The Sea, one part of which eventually became The Old Man and the Sea. The other parts, as edited by Charles Scribner, were later published posthumously in 1970 as Islands in the Stream.
In 1940 Hemingway left Pfeiffer for Martha Gellhorn. The same year he published For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway and Gellhorn then went to China. Next, he became a war correspondent with the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division where he met Mary Welsh. In 1946, one year after divorcing Gellhorn, he married Welsh.
The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Two years later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But as he approached his sixties, Hemingway’s health began deteriorating. The once robust adventurer now suffered from hypertension, mild diabetes, depression, and paranoia. Despite treatment for mental health issues, Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961. He is remembered as one of the great stylistic innovators of modern American literature.
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