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6 Fascinating Biographies on Ernest Hemingway

Celebrate the life of one of the most iconic American writers to date.

• Photo Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ernest Hemingway was not only a revolutionary American novelist, but he was also an adventure seeker and world traveler.

Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921, where he worked, partied, and learned from other authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. In 1925 his first major piece, In Our Time , was published. In the following year, one of his most famous books, The Sun Also Rises , was released. 

His novel, The Sun Also Rises , took much inspiration from his life while settled in Paris. While it is not the most optimistic book, the story involves a group of American expatriates working in France and Spain,  which reflected Hemingway and his author-friends’ current situations. These famous authors would go on to be considered a group of writers called The Lost Generation .

Throughout the thirties, the novelist drew creativity from his travels to Spain and Africa. His love for bullfighting helped him write Death in the Afternoon , and an African safari resulted in Green Hills of Africa . Hemingway’s global travels fueled his motivation and artistry throughout his entire life and often resulted in some of his most trailblazing work.

During the post-war years, Hemingway wrote some of his other greatest novels and short-stories including For Whom the Bells Toll , A Moveable Feast , and The Old Man and the Sea , which he received a Pulitzer Prize for in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

While we give a big-picture look at Hemingway’s career, the biographies on this list offer insights into his private life and stories behind the work that captivate us. These biographies come from some of the closest sources to the artist and provide a deeper look into who Hemingway truly was and how it shaped his work.

Related: 10 Moving Biographies and Memoirs

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Papa Hemingway

By A. E. Hotchner

In 1948, journalist A.E. Hotchner traveled to Cuba in hopes of interviewing Hemingway for an article on “The Future of Literature,” for Cosmopolitan magazine. While the article was never published, Hemingway and Hotchner developed a strong friendship that lasted until Hemingway’s death in 1961.

Throughout the years of friendship, the pair caroused through the bars of New York City, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, fished in the waters off of Cuba, and hunted in the Idaho wild. 

Hotchner candidly recites the life of Hemingway down to the details of his daily routine. From hand writing long, descriptive passages, to memories with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, and finally to Hemingway’s final years and his battle with depression, Hotchner celebrates the life of one of the most iconic literary figures in Papa Hemingway.   

Hunting with Hemingway

By Hilary Hemingway, Jeff Lindsay

Fifteen years after her father’s death, Hilary Hemingway received an intriguing inheritance—an audio cassette recorded by her father Les ,recounting the incredible and unbelievably true hunting stories he shared with his older brother, Ernest Hemingway.

Humorous tales of the Hemingway brothers hunting ferocious crocodiles, dangerous Komodo dragons, and scary ostriches are retold by Hilary. However, along with these fun memories is Les’s seriousness in defending his brother’s reputation and life.

Hilary brings us into the larger-than-life bond between Ernest and Les and shares her own story with making peace with the Hemingway legacy.

Hemingway’s Boat

By Paul Hendrickson

Focusing on the Hemingway’s life in the years of 1934-1961, Paul Hendrickson explores the highs and lows from Hemingway’s peak as the monarch of American letters until his suicide. During this time, one thing remained constant in Hemingway’s life: his beloved boat Pilar. 

Hendrickson dives into unpublished work, interviews with Hemingway’s sons, and undiscovered truths of the novelist’s life to bring a fresh understanding of the great American writer fifty years after his death.

Ernest Hemingway

By Mary V. Dearborn

Mary V. Dearborn’s biography on Hemingway was the first in many aspects. The first to use never-used-before material, the first to be written by a woman, and the first full biography of Hemingway in over fifteen years.

Published in 2017, Dearborn’s biography of Hemingway explores the complexity of his personality, his work, and his life. His seven novels and six short-story collections have changed the art of fiction and literature and continue to influence it today.

Dearborn also examines Hemingway’s personality and character on a deeper level as it was the same demons inspiring his revolutionary work that ultimately were leading him to his death in 1961.

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The Young Hemingway

By Michael Reynolds

Michael Reynolds breaks down Hemingway’s life into five pivotal parts through his Hemingway Collection, from his early life to his final years. The Young Hemingway is the first biography in the series focusing on Hemingway’s upbringing, the foundation his writing will be built on, and his experience during World War I.

Going through the formidable years of his life, Reynolds reveals Hemingway’s father’s own self-destructive battle with depression , his mother’s fierce sense of spiritualism and independence, and Agnes Von Kurowsky—the first woman Hemingway fell in love with.

Ernest’s Way

By Cristen Hemingway James

Hemingway’s great granddaughter Cristen Hemingway James takes us around the world to the different places the great American novelist lived, drank, fought, ran with the bulls, and wrote his most famous work. Ernest Hemingway thrived on exploring new places, creating excitement, and interacting with influential artists of the twentieth century.

In Ernest’s Way, an intimate look into Hemingway’s life is created with essential insights and information on the many places around the world he lived. This biography is the first to give a comprehensive guide to the author’s exhilarating adventures and how each place shaped his writing.

Cristen not only brings us a deeper glimpse into Hemingway’s life and work, but she also brings each of these places to life and takes us on our own Hemingway-inspired adventure.

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Featured image: National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

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Reviews of Biographies of Ernest Hemingway From the Archives of The New York Times Related Articles Featured Author: Ernest Hemingway Hemingway Collection/ JFK Library, Boston Hemingway as a child in Willow Lake, Michigan. Carlos Baker's 'Ernest Hemingway' (1968) "Professor Baker has delivered his trophy and it is, as promised, a life-size replica of Ernest Hemingway. . . . In plain language, reading Carlos Baker's long-awaited biography is hugely exasperating. But then so, apparently, was Ernest Hemingway." Bernice Kert's 'The Hemingway Women' (1983) "Kert's study proves valuable in ways that are different from, and certainly more graceful than, the usual psychobiography. By re-creating Hemingway's life from the perspective of his wives and lovers, a now-familiar story achieves greater dimension." Raymond Carver on Hemingway Biographies by Jeffrey Meyers and Peter Griffin (1985) "Adulation is not a requirement for biographers, but Mr. Meyers's book fairly bristles with disapproval of its subject. . . . The only possible antidote for how you feel about Hemingway after finishing this book is to go back at once and reread the fiction itself. How clear, serene and solid the best work still seems . . ." Kenneth S. Lynn's 'Hemingway' (1987) "Hemingway, in Mr. Lynn's version, actually lived the kind of courageous and painful life he wrote about. . . . 'Hemingway' helps us recover a view of his life as having been, despite its end, a success." James R. Mellow's 'Hemingway' (1992) ". . . fresh and powerfully coherent, and stands with the best work done on the writer to date." Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes's 'Hemingway's Genders' (1994) ". . . a surprisingly succinct and jargon-free essay despite its deconstructionist subtitle . . . The results are richly rewarding. Whatever else the authors accomplish, they force one to see new subtleties in stories read dozens of times before . . ." Michael Reynolds's 'Hemingway: The 1930's' (1997) ". . . a good account of the 10 years of Ernest Hemingway's life in which his public image took shape and his writing skills began to mature. However, Michael Reynolds perpetuates the popular myth that by knowing more about Hemingway's life we know more about his novels." Michael Reynolds's 'Hemingway: The Final Years' (1999) "Excellent and exhaustive . . . One of the forces of disintegration, sensitively considered by Reynolds, was Hemingway's fear that he would never write anything better than 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' . . . " Return to the Books Home Page

Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'

(1899-1961)

Who Was Ernest Hemingway?

Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time . He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

Early Life and Career

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised their son in this conservative suburb of Chicago, but the family also spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there that the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and appreciate the outdoors.

In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, Trapeze and Tabula , writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation, the budding journalist went to work for the Kansas City Star , gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down prose style.

He once said, "On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."

Military Experience

In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his service, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained injuries that landed him in a hospital in Milan.

There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left him for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided fodder for his works "A Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms .

Still nursing his injury and recovering from the brutalities of war at the young age of 20, he returned to the United States and spent time in northern Michigan before taking a job at the Toronto Star .

It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Star .

Life in Europe

In 1925, the couple, joining a group of British and American expatriates, took a trip to the festival that would later provide the basis of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises . The novel is widely considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar disillusionment of his generation.

Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises , Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of short stories, Men Without Women.

Critical Acclaim

Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms , securing his lasting place in the literary canon.

When he wasn't writing, Hemingway spent much of the 1930s chasing adventure: big-game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain and deep-sea fishing in Florida. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hemingway met a fellow war correspondent named Martha Gellhorn (soon to become wife number three) and gathered material for his next novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls , which would eventually be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Almost predictably, his marriage to Pfeiffer deteriorated and the couple divorced. Gellhorn and Hemingway married soon after and purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba, which would serve as their winter residence.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hemingway served as a correspondent and was present at several of the war's key moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end of the war, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would later marry after divorcing Gellhorn.

In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea , which would become perhaps his most famous book, finally winning him the Pulitzer Prize he had long been denied.

Personal Struggles and Suicide

The author continued his forays into Africa and sustained several injuries during his adventures, even surviving multiple plane crashes.

In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, the burly Hemingway's body and mind were beginning to betray him. Recovering from various old injuries in Cuba, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.

He wrote A Moveable Feast , a memoir of his years in Paris, and retired permanently to Idaho. There he continued to battle with deteriorating mental and physical health.

Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide in his Ketchum home.

Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.

When asked by George Plimpton about the function of his art, Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the "one true sentence": "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality."

In August 2018, a 62-year-old short story by Hemingway, "A Room on the Garden Side," was published for the first time in The Strand Magazine . Set in Paris shortly after the liberation of the city from Nazi forces in 1944, the story was one of five composed by the writer in 1956 about his World War II experiences. It became the second story from the series to earn posthumous publication, following "Black Ass at the Crossroads."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Ernest Hemingway
• Birth Year: 1899
• Birth date: July 21, 1899
• Birth State: Illinois
• Birth City: Cicero (now in Oak Park)
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Oak Park and River Forest High School
• Death Year: 1961
• Death date: July 2, 1961
• Death State: Idaho
• Death City: Ketchum
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Ernest Hemingway Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/ernest-hemingway
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 7, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
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World War I

Becoming a writer, life in paris, getting published, back to the u.s., the spanish civil war, world war ii, the pulitzer and nobel prizes, decline and death.

• B.A., English Literature, University of Houston

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Best known for his novels and short stories, he was also an accomplished journalist and war correspondent. Hemingway's trademark prose style—simple and spare—influenced a generation of writers.

Fast Facts: Ernest Hemingway

• Known For : Journalist and member of the Lost Generation group of writers who won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature
• Born : July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois
• Parents : Grace Hall Hemingway and Clarence ("Ed") Edmonds Hemingway
• Died : July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho
• Education : Oak Park High School
• Published Works : The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast
• Spouse(s) : Hadley Richardson (m. 1921–1927), Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1939), Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945), Mary Welsh (1946–1961)
• Children : With Hadley Richardson: John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway ("Jack" 1923–2000); with Pauline Pfeiffer: Patrick (b. 1928), Gregory ("Gig" 1931–2001)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, the second child born to Grace Hall Hemingway and Clarence ("Ed") Edmonds Hemingway. Ed was a general medical practitioner and Grace a would-be opera singer turned music teacher.

Hemingway's parents reportedly had an unconventional arrangement, in which Grace, an ardent feminist, would agree to marry Ed only if he could assure her she would not be responsible for the housework or cooking. Ed acquiesced; in addition to his busy medical practice, he ran the household, managed the servants, and even cooked meals when the need arose.

Ernest Hemingway grew up with four sisters; his much-longed-for brother did not arrive until Ernest was 15 years old. Young Ernest enjoyed family vacations at a cottage in northern Michigan where he developed a love of the outdoors and learned hunting and fishing from his father. His mother, who insisted that all of her children learn to play an instrument, instilled in him an appreciation of the arts.

In high school, Hemingway co-edited the school newspaper and competed on the football and swim teams. Fond of impromptu boxing matches with his friends, Hemingway also played cello in the school orchestra. He graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917.

Hired by the Kansas City Star in 1917 as a reporter covering the police beat, Hemingway—obligated to adhere to the newspaper's style guidelines—began to develop the succinct, simple style of writing that would become his trademark. That style was a dramatic departure from the ornate prose that dominated literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After six months in Kansas City, Hemingway longed for adventure. Ineligible for military service due to poor eyesight, he volunteered in 1918 as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Europe. In July of that year, while on duty in Italy, Hemingway was severely injured by an exploding mortar shell. His legs were peppered by more than 200 shell fragments, a painful and debilitating injury that required several surgeries.

As the first American to have survived being wounded in Italy in World War I , Hemingway was awarded a medal from the Italian government.

While recovering from his wounds at a hospital in Milan, Hemingway met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse with the American Red Cross . He and Agnes made plans to marry once he had earned enough money.

After the war ended in November 1918, Hemingway returned to the United States to look for a job, but the wedding was not to be. Hemingway received a letter from Agnes in March 1919, breaking off the relationship. Devastated, he became depressed and rarely left the house.

Hemingway spent a year at his parents' home, recovering from wounds both physical and emotional. In early 1920, mostly recovered and eager to be employed, Hemingway got a job in Toronto helping a woman care for her disabled son. There he met the features editor of the Toronto Star Weekly , which hired him as a feature writer.

In fall of that year, he moved to Chicago and became a writer for  The Cooperative Commonwealth , a monthly magazine, while still working for the Star .

Hemingway, however, longed to write fiction. He began submitting short stories to magazines, but they were repeatedly rejected. Soon, however, Hemingway had reason for hope. Through mutual friends, Hemingway met novelist Sherwood Anderson, who was impressed by Hemingway's short stories and encouraged him to pursue a career in writing.

Hemingway also met the woman who would become his first wife: Hadley Richardson. A native of St. Louis, Richardson had come to Chicago to visit friends after the death of her mother. She managed to support herself with a small trust fund left to her by her mother. The pair married in September 1921.

Sherwood Anderson, just back from a trip to Europe, urged the newly married couple to move to Paris, where he believed a writer's talent could flourish. He furnished the Hemingways with letters of introduction to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound and modernist writer Gertrude Stein . They set sail from New York in December 1921.

The Hemingways found an inexpensive apartment in a working-class district in Paris. They lived on Hadley's inheritance and Hemingway's income from the Toronto Star Weekly , which employed him as a foreign correspondent. Hemingway also rented out a small hotel room to use as his workplace.

There, in a burst of productivity, Hemingway filled one notebook after another with stories, poems, and accounts of his childhood trips to Michigan.

Hemingway finally garnered an invitation to the salon of Gertrude Stein, with whom he later developed a deep friendship. Stein's home in Paris had become a meeting place for various artists and writers of the era, with Stein acting as a mentor to several prominent writers.

Stein promoted the simplification of both prose and poetry as a backlash to the elaborate style of writing seen in past decades. Hemingway took her suggestions to heart and later credited Stein for having taught him valuable lessons that influenced his writing style.

Hemingway and Stein belonged to the group of American expatriate writers in 1920s Paris who came to be known as the " Lost Generation ." These writers had become disillusioned with traditional American values following World War I; their work often reflected their sense of futility and despair. Other writers in this group included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and John Dos Passos.

In December 1922, Hemingway endured what might be considered a writer's worst nightmare. His wife, traveling by train to meet him for a holiday, lost a valise filled with a large portion of his recent work, including carbon copies. The papers were never found.

In 1923, several of Hemingway's poems and stories were accepted for publication in two American literary magazines, Poetry and The Little Review . In the summer of that year, Hemingway's first book, "Three Stories and Ten Poems," was published by an American-owned Paris publishing house.

On a trip to Spain in the summer of 1923, Hemingway witnessed his first bullfight. He wrote of bullfighting in the Star , seeming to condemn the sport and romanticize it at the same time. On another excursion to Spain, Hemingway covered the traditional "running of the bulls" at Pamplona, during which young men—courting death or, at the very least, injury—ran through town pursued by a throng of angry bulls.

The Hemingways returned to Toronto for the birth of their son. John Hadley Hemingway (nicknamed "Bumby") was born October 10, 1923. They returned to Paris in January 1924, where Hemingway continued to work on a new collection of short stories, later published in the book "In Our Time."

Hemingway returned to Spain to work on his upcoming novel set in Spain: "The Sun Also Rises." The book was published in 1926, to mostly good reviews.

Yet Hemingway's marriage was in turmoil. He had begun an affair in 1925 with American journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who worked for the Paris Vogue . The Hemingways divorced in January 1927; Pfeiffer and Hemingway married in May of that year. Hadley later remarried and returned to Chicago with Bumby in 1934.

In 1928, Hemingway and his second wife returned to the United States to live. In June 1928, Pauline gave birth to son Patrick in Kansas City. A second son, Gregory, would be born in 1931. The Hemingways rented a house in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway worked on his latest book, "A Farewell to Arms," based upon his World War I experiences.

In December 1928, Hemingway received shocking news—his father, despondent over mounting health and financial problems, had shot himself to death. Hemingway, who'd had a strained relationship with his parents, reconciled with his mother after his father's suicide and helped support her financially.

In May 1928, Scribner's Magazine published its first installment of "A Farewell to Arms." It was well-received; however, the second and third installments, deemed profane and sexually explicit, were banned from newsstands in Boston. Such criticism only served to boost sales when the entire book was published in September 1929.

The early 1930s proved to be a productive (if not always successful) time for Hemingway. Fascinated by bullfighting, he traveled to Spain to do research for the non-fiction book, "Death in the Afternoon." It was published in 1932 to generally poor reviews and was followed by several less-than-successful short story collections.

Ever the adventurer, Hemingway traveled to Africa on a shooting safari in November 1933. Although the trip was somewhat disastrous—Hemingway clashed with his companions and later became ill with dysentery—it provided him with ample material for a short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," as well as a non-fiction book, "Green Hills of Africa."

While Hemingway was on a hunting and fishing trip in the United States in the summer of 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. A supporter of the loyalist (anti-Fascist) forces, Hemingway donated money for ambulances. He also signed on as a journalist to cover the conflict for a group of American newspapers and became involved in making a documentary. While in Spain, Hemingway began an affair with Martha Gellhorn, an American journalist and documentarian.

Weary of her husband's adulterous ways, Pauline took her sons and left Key West in December 1939. Only months after she divorced Hemingway, he married Martha Gellhorn in November 1940.

Hemingway and Gellhorn rented a farmhouse in Cuba just outside of Havana, where both could work on their writing. Traveling between Cuba and Key West, Hemingway wrote one of his most popular novels: "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

A fictionalized account of the Spanish Civil War, the book was published in October 1940 and became a bestseller. Despite being named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1941, the book did not win because the president of Columbia University (which bestowed the award) vetoed the decision.

As Martha's reputation as a journalist grew, she earned assignments around the globe, leaving Hemingway resentful of her long absences. But soon, they would both be globetrotting. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, both Hemingway and Gellhorn signed on as war correspondents.

Hemingway was allowed on board a troop transport ship, from which he was able to watch the D-day invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

While in London during the war, Hemingway began an affair with the woman who would become his fourth wife—journalist Mary Welsh. Gellhorn learned of the affair and divorced Hemingway in 1945. He and Welsh married in 1946. They alternated between homes in Cuba and Idaho.

In January 1951, Hemingway began writing a book that would become one of his most celebrated works: " The Old Man and the Sea ." A bestseller, the novella also won Hemingway his long-awaited Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

The Hemingways traveled extensively but were often the victims of bad luck. They were involved in two plane crashes in Africa during one trip in 1953. Hemingway was severely injured, sustaining internal and head injuries as well as burns. Some newspapers erroneously reported that he had died in the second crash.

In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the career-topping Nobel Prize for literature.

In January 1959, the Hemingways moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway, now nearly 60 years old, had suffered for several years with high blood pressure and the effects of years of heavy drinking. He had also become moody and depressed and appeared to be deteriorating mentally.

In November 1960, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for treatment of his physical and mental symptoms. He received electroshock therapy for his depression and was sent home after a two-month stay. Hemingway became further depressed when he realized he was unable to write after the treatments.

After three suicide attempts, Hemingway was readmitted to the Mayo Clinic and given more shock treatments. Although his wife protested, he convinced his doctors he was well enough to go home. Only days after being discharged from the hospital, Hemingway shot himself in the head in his Ketchum home early on the morning of July 2, 1961. He died instantly.

A larger-than-life figure, Hemingway thrived on high adventure, from safaris and bullfights to wartime journalism and adulterous affairs, communicating that to his readers in an immediately recognizable spare, staccato format. Hemingway is among the most prominent and influential of the "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers who lived in Paris in the 1920s.

Known affectionately as "Papa Hemingway," he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in literature, and several of his books were made into movies. 

• Dearborn, Mary V. "Ernest Hemingway: A Biography." New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
• Hemingway, Ernest. "Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition." New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
• Henderson, Paul. "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961." New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
• Hutchisson, James M. "Ernest Hemingway: A New Life." University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.
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Ernest Hemingway

James M. Hutchisson

$37.95 | Hardcover Edition ISBN: 978-0-271-07534-1

Available as an e-book

320 pages 7" × 10" 23 b&w illustrations 2016

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“The best single-volume Hemingway biography now available. Summing up: Essential.” —S. Miller, Choice

• Description
• Table of Contents
• Sample Chapters

This is an examination of the writer through a new lens—one that more accurately captures Hemingway’s virtues as well as his flaws. Hutchisson situates Hemingway’s life and art in the defining contexts of the women he loved and lost, the places he held dear, and the specter of mental illness that haunted his family. This balanced portrait examines for the first time in full detail the legendary writer’s complex medical history and his struggle against clinical depression.

“Toward the end of James J. Hutchisson’s deftly written biography of Ernest Hemingway, we are reminded to ‘remember how difficult it was for him to be “Ernest Hemingway.”’ That’s something no reader of this well-researched book is likely to forget. Chapter after chapter, we see Hemingway in splendid complication as both the man and the artist.” —Sibbie O'Sullivan, Washington Post Book World

“Written in graceful, jargon-free prose, this compact biography will appeal broadly to general readers, students, and scholars.” —William Gargan, Library Journal

“Lovingly detailed. . . . Hutchisson celebrates Hemingway’s many career triumphs, but pays at least as much attention to his troubles.” —Robert Fulford, National Post

“Hutchisson has done the impossible: He has made an original contribution to the literature about the most written-about author in American letters.” —Ron Capshaw, National Review

“A perception exists that everything we need to know about the author of A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast (among so many other great works) has been said ad infinitum. James M. Hutchisson’s Ernest Hemingway: A New Life proves how untrue that thought is. Nearly thirty years after a revisionary wave of biographies reimagined the man, Hutchisson arrives to reset the scales once more, giving us a fuller, more nuanced portrait than we’ve ever enjoyed. Every generation deserves its own Hemingway, and this is ours.” —Kirk Curnutt, board member of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and author of Reading Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not”: Glosses and Commentary

“A work of mature judgment and rigorous scholarship, lucidly, often elegantly written.” —Matthew Stewart, American Studies

“Building on newly available letters and other sources, this first new Hemingway biography in twenty years probes the author’s complicated relationships with his family, mentors, wives—and other women. Readers will appreciate this documented account of Hemingway’s fascinating life; those familiar with earlier biographies will find much fresh material in this accessible volume.” —Ellen Andrews Knodt, Pennsylvania State University, Abington

“ Ernest Hemingway: A New Life marks a refreshing change in approach. With the exception of Michael Reynolds’s multivolume biography, biographers since Carlos Baker have viewed Hemingway through various limited critical perspectives, resulting in life stories that differ markedly from one another. James Hutchisson’s A New Life offers an unbiased view of a complex personality.” —Robert E. Fleming, author of The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers

“Like a masterful visual artist who takes a familiar subject and makes it fresh and interesting, James Hutchisson gives us an original and compelling biographical portrait of Ernest Hemingway. By examining patterns in Hemingway's life and providing additional context, Hutchisson enables us to see aspects of the writer’s life and art in a new light. The result is a balanced (if somewhat more sympathetic) view of Hemingway and a worthy counterpoint to previous biographies.” —Ruth Hawkins, author of Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage

“In the first Hemingway biography in two decades, Hutchisson draws on recent scholarship, newly available family and medical histories, and expanded editions of posthumous works to craft a balanced and lucid treatment of Hemingway that deftly charts his spatial and sexual geographies. Hutchisson remains attuned to the patterns in Hemingway’s life without sacrificing Hemingway’s complexity. He probes Hemingway’s contradictions without seeking to resolve them. This biography offers an invaluable aid to scholars of the frequently misunderstood late and posthumous works by examining Hemingway’s continuing efforts to transcend the boundaries of the styles and forms his critics had come to expect. This portrait of Hemingway shows a writer who never ceased to evolve.” —Julieann Veronica Ulin, Florida Atlantic University

“Hutchisson is extremely good at describing the demons that rode [Hemingway] and the suffering they caused him, and he strikes an admirable balance between excuse and generous empathy that culminates in his treatment of Hemingway’s final desperate act early on the morning of July 2, 1961.” —Chilton Williamson, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

James M. Hutchisson is Professor of American Literature at The Citadel and the author of The Rise of Sinclair Lewis , also published by Penn State University Press.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Midwest: Childhood and Youth

2 Italy and Agnes von Kurowsky

3 Michigan, Chicago, and Hadley

5 Duff Twysden and The Sun Also Rises

6 Pauline, Key West, and A Farewell to Arms

7 Spain and Death in the Afternoon

8 Jane Mason and Africa

9 Martha Gellhorn and the Spanish Civil War

10 Cuba and For Whom the Bell Tolls

11 China and World War II

12 Mary, Adriana, and Across the River and into the Trees

13 Revisiting the Past: Africa and Paris

14 Dangerous Summers: Spain, Cuba, Idaho

Selected Bibliography

Ernest Hemingway is probably the most famous literary figure of all time. Some might argue that Hemingway wasn’t the greatest American writer, or even the creator of the best American book. But Ernest Hemingway certainly is the American writer. He was the perfect blend of literary talent and iconic personality, and the contours of his life have become deeply etched in the American popular consciousness—from his vibrant, fledgling self in patched jacket and sneakers on the boulevards of 1920s Paris to his white-bearded, barrel-chested eminence in khaki shorts and long-billed fishing cap off the waters of 1950s Cuba. “Papa” still walks among us and looms large on the literary horizon—just as he wanted it to be.

Hemingway is also one of the most written-about authors, in terms of both his life and his art. Yet, surprisingly, there has not been a single-volume biography of Hemingway published in almost twenty-five years. Most of his biographers have seemed to veer from one pole of critical approval to the other, either accepting wholesale—or with exaggerated winks and nods—the self-created legend of the hypermasculine hero, or disapproving of Hemingway by emphasizing the superficial image of him as a mean-spirited, alcoholic womanizer.

Carlos Baker’s “official” biography of 1969, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, laid the groundwork for all further writing on the author, but even Baker, as the authorized scribe, many times expressed true disdain for his subject. (Jack Hemingway, the author’s eldest son, once complained that Baker had made his father out to be “a son of a bitch.”) Jeffrey Meyers’s 1985 Hemingway: A Biography, while clearly written and accessible, is openly disapproving. Kenneth Lynn’s controversial 1987 psychobiography of Hemingway advances the fascinating argument that the greatest trauma of Hemingway’s life was a consistent pattern of gender confusion, but it does not do full justice to the other material of Hemingway’s life and work. James Mellow’s 1992 book reads nearly everything that Hemingway wrote in the context of the homoeroticism within Hemingway’s circle. Unlike previous biographers, I see Hemingway as someone who became many things to many people—sometimes opposite things. He was the war hero, the foreign correspondent, the expatriate, the consummate artist, the marlin fisherman and lion hunter, the womanizer, the drinker, the father and husband, the overbearing egotist, the tragic figure whose thoughts of self-destruction trailed him for nearly his entire life.

Hemingway’s keystone subject was violent death. Plagued by depression and a history of mental illness in his family, Hemingway fought constantly against the insidious slow descent of what he called “the black ass,” which could envelop him in an instant in a fog of despair. The adventuring, the risk taking, the life lived large, was collectively a way of avoiding the dark places that he tried to steer clear of in his life, so that he could explore them with some measure of safety in his art. His writing was a means of connecting with deep, raw emotion; to him, this meant being truthful about what is real—true to what is. The dark call to die, yet the insistence upon continuing, like the offering and withdrawing of emotion in his fiction, is an essential rhythm of Hemingway’s life and art, just as are the silences that sit in his short, declarative sentences—a kind of concession to dread and, ultimately, mortality. It might not be too much to say that he was in some ways a nexus for death, for among the people whom he became close to, or who were part of his family, many were suicides. The psychic terrain that he lived in must therefore have been very hard for him to navigate while still remaining sane.

It is often said that one of Hemingway’s best fictional creations was Ernest Hemingway himself. But what has not been traced through his life and work is how he discovered (or created) different identities through his writing, or how he used his writing to try to reconcile the contradictory elements within himself. I thus tend to see Hemingway more sympathetically than many earlier writers have; I believe he thought that if he could see himself clean and whole—what he thought of as the “true gen”—his writing might be useful to others who also lived their lives as journeys into themselves. Like most people, Hemingway changed over the course of his life. He was not the static figure that he has often been made out to be.

Hemingway had unusually high standards for his work, for others’ work, and for others’ friendships. So great a talent as his, and the concurrent fame and celebrity status that accompanied it, created huge difficulties in his personal life that he could never overcome, although he tried mightily to do so. Having the mantle of fame put on his shoulders while he was so young, he was always looking over his shoulder at the competition. He therefore developed a competitive streak that often made it impossible for him to praise fellow writers or to feel that anybody was as good a writer as he was. His relationships were often tempestuous, like a summer storm crossing the bay. His high standards created an almost suffocating anxiety in him; it is actually something of a miracle that he survived that pressure as long as he did. He also had a deeply ingrained sense of character, which he often, all too humanly, failed to live up to. This seems forgivable in most people, but many found it unforgivable in Hemingway. As Edmund Wilson once snidely put it, Hemingway had an inviolable code of honor that he was always breaking.

Hemingway also had an insecurity about all things physical. He was perpetually trying to impress people with his athletic skill, his sexual prowess, his stamina, his muscle tone, and his ability to participate competitively in physically challenging activities like sportfishing and boxing. His obsession with the body led him to explore the physical in his fiction in ways that no one had ever done before, although that interest did not come into focus until after the period of his greatest productivity, 1926–1940. After 1940, he pondered this theme in his fiction—though he could never push through and actually publish most of this work, perhaps for the very reasons that drove his own physical insecurities. His obsession with the physical also probably accounted for his often harsh treatment of his wives and lovers, since all of those relationships—with the exception of his first wife, Hadley—were based largely on sexual attraction. His letters to his wives and wives-to-be are among the most passionate and heartfelt in all of literary history. He thought that love was both the sine qua non of human existence and the greatest deceiver. When his marriages collapsed, he spun downward each time, powerlessly caught in an inner cyclone of guilt, anxiety, and even grief. By the time his emotions were spent, he was spiritually and psychically empty, hollowed out like a drum.

In this book, I pursue several specific angles of entry into understanding Hemingway. One is the pattern of how his writing was influenced by women and by place. I offer an organized look at the sequence of results produced in his work by his various wives, lovers, and mistresses. Each major novel gestated in Hemingway’s consciousness and was brought to fruition during a relationship—whether sexual or not—with a woman. Hemingway’s relationships with women were also inextricably bound to geographic locale. The battlefield seems to have been the most recurrent setting, but he also adopted a series of spiritual homes that became stimuli to creativity—most of all Spain, which he said in the second sentence of The Dangerous Summer that he loved more than any place on earth.

I also emphasize Hemingway’s interest in medicine (his father was a physician, and his third son became one) and analyze his complex medical profile. I take into account his family health history, his recurrent vision problems, and the pattern of accidents, injuries, and illnesses that plagued him throughout his life. As John Dos Passos once said, he never knew an athletic, vigorous man who spent as much time in bed as Hemingway did. Hemingway had a complicated medical history that helps explain his emotions and attitudes, his public behavior, his fictional themes and preoccupations, and his ability or inability to write. Medical records among his personal papers show that for much of his life Hemingway took medications that conflicted chemically with one another and eventually produced disastrous results. It is my strong belief that it was this condition, much more than the idea that he was felled by fame or corrupted by the allure of celebrity, that propelled him down the slope into suicide at the end of his life. With his family history of mental illness, it is not surprising that Hemingway was obsessed with suicides, real and imagined. Trying to stare down the dark facts of a difficult world was something that had been part of him since youth.

The portrait of Hemingway that emerges in this book is neither tragic nor heroic, but is instead a balanced assessment that shows the ambition that drove him, and the anxieties, both real and imagined, that destroyed him.

Biography & Memoir

General Interest

Also of Interest

American Fiction, American Myth

Essays by Philip Young

Philip Young Edited by David Morrell and Sandra Spanier

The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930

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Article contents

Hemingway, ernest.

• Charles Robert Baker
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.698
• Published online: 26 July 2017

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 , in Oak Park, Illinois. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway , was a prominent physician and surgeon and a member of the staff of Oak Park Hospital. He was a powerful physical presence: he stood six feet tall, was muscular, and sported a full, black beard. On 1 October 1896 , he married Grace Hall , a lively, artistic woman who gave up a potential operatic career to become the doctor's wife. The couple had six children: Marcelline , Ernest, Ursula , Madelaine , Carol , and Leicester . Dr. Hemingway and his wife were active in civic affairs and Oak Park's First Congregational Church, and Grace taught singing and piano.

The family spent part of every summer at their cottage on Walloon (formerly Bear) Lake in northern Michigan, and it was here that Ernest was taught how to hunt and fish by his father, a skilled and passionate outdoorsman. The idyllic and primitive setting of the eight-mile lake was enhanced by the presence of a number of Ojibway Indians who had settled in an abandoned lumber camp nearby. The Ojibways, who made their living logging what white men had left behind, left a lasting impression on young Hemingway and were characterized in many of his early short stories.

In Oak Park, Hemingway led the conventional, restrictive life that most boys of upper-middle-class families in late Victorian America endured; he attended public school, acted in school plays, played the cello, participated in team sports, and sang in the church choir. In high school he wrote for the school newspaper and contributed stories and poems to the literary magazine. The stories are full of the blood and thunder of most adolescent male writing and the poems are about football. His use of humor, sarcasm, and pseudo-illiterate dialect reveal the strong influence of popular writer Ring Lardner , but there is evidence of Hemingway's search for his own style.

After graduation, Hemingway had three choices: war, work, or college. The United States had entered World War I two months before Hemingway graduated, but Dr. Hemingway forbade his son's enlisting. Because of a deficiency in Hemingway's left eye, it is unlikely that the army would have accepted him. He expressed no desire to attend college, so his uncle, Alfred Tyler Hemingway , a Kansas City businessman, used his influence to get the boy a job as a cub reporter with the Kansas City Star .

Hemingway arrived in Kansas City in October 1917 . The newspaper assigned him to the police and hospital beat, which forced his exposure to people and acts that were far removed from the narrow confines of Oak Park. However, the most important things Hemingway gained during his time in Kansas City were the camaraderie and example of other writers and the lessons he learned from the Star 's stylebook. The stylebook consisted of 110 rules of prose usage that the Star 's reporters were expected to follow. Rule number one admonishes writers to “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Rule number three reads, “Eliminate every superfluous word.” Other rules address the use of slang and the avoidance of adjectives. At the age of eighteen, Hemingway accepted these rules as his artistic credo and remained faithful to them for the rest of his life.

Wounded in Italy

Hemingway's time in Kansas City was brief. In April 1918 , he and Ted Brumback , a fellow reporter, enlisted in the American Red Cross and were assigned to drive ambulances for the Italian army. Hemingway sailed from New York on 23 May and arrived in Schio, Italy, on 4 June. After three weeks of driving the wounded to medical facilities, Hemingway volunteered to distribute chocolate and cigarettes to the men on the front lines. Just after midnight on 8 July, Hemingway was at a forward observation post when an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded nearby. Two hundred twenty-seven pieces of shrapnel cut into his legs. Despite this, he was able to carry a wounded Italian soldier to safety before being hit by Austrian machine-gun fire, one bullet lodging in his right knee and another in his right foot.

Hemingway was the first American to be wounded in Italy and was the first patient to be cared for in the new American Red Cross hospital in Milan. During his three-month hospital stay he fell in love with one of his nurses, Agnes von Kurowsky . When Hemingway had recovered sufficiently from surgery to get about with the aid of crutches or a cane, Agnes accompanied him to dinner, the opera, and the horse races. Their romance progressed to the point that when the war ended and Hemingway sailed for home in early January 1919 , he fully expected Agnes to follow soon thereafter and become his wife.

Hemingway, in his tailor-made Italian uniform, walked down the gangplank in New York on 21 January 1919 to a hero's welcome. Newspaper reporters scrambled to get his story and, at home in Oak Park, he was much sought after as a guest speaker. His enjoyment of celebrity was short-lived, however, when he received a letter from Agnes in March announcing her engagement to an Italian officer. Hemingway took his anger and grief to Lake Walloon where he camped, fished, and wrote short stories before returning home to Oak Park in December. In January 1920 , Hemingway moved to Toronto as a paid companion for a partially crippled young man and became a freelance writer for the Toronto Daily Star . When summer came, he quit his work in Toronto and joined his family at Lake Walloon. Relations with his mother and father had reached a breaking point. Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway were dismayed that their twenty-one-year-old son had not created a life for himself apart from them. His mother issued an ultimatum in the form of a letter stating that until Hemingway chose to “cease [his] lazy loafing and pleasure seeking” and “come into [his] manhood” he would not be welcome in the Hemingway home. Hemingway never forgot or forgave this letter. In October 1920 , having suffered severe wounds from the war, Agnes, and now his mother, he moved in with a friend in Chicago and took a job writing for the Cooperative Commonwealth magazine.

Hadley and Paris

Hemingway met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in Chicago at a party thrown by a mutual friend. The moment she walked into the room, Hemingway knew she was the woman he would marry. Hadley, who lived in St. Louis, was equally attracted to the handsome young man who was eight years her junior. After a year of passionate correspondence, the two were married on 3 September 1921 . Hemingway's next-door neighbor was the popular novelist Sherwood Anderson . Anderson had recently returned from a trip to Paris and convinced Hemingway that it was the perfect place for a young writer to live. Hemingway made an agreement to write feature stories for the Toronto Daily Star and, with letters of introduction from Anderson to the two most influential American writers living in Paris, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein , he and his wife set sail for Europe on 8 December 1921 and arrived in Paris on 20 December .

The fiction and poetry Hemingway brought to Paris was written between his return from Italy and his marriage to Hadley and shows little artistic progress beyond his high school writings. But Paris was to be his university and Pound and Stein were to be his professors. Pound was the founder of the imagist movement in poetry. Imagist poets such as Amy Lowell and H. D. ( Hilda Doolittle ) employed a technique derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry that stressed clarity and economy of language. Pound read Hemingway's poems and arranged to have six of them published in the January 1923 issue of Poetry . The magazine's editor and founder, Harriet Monroe , identified Hemingway as “a young Chicago poet now abroad who will soon issue in Paris his first book of verse.” Little critical attention has been paid to Hemingway the poet. Indeed, his poems are considered to be the work of a young man who was merely dabbling in another form of literary expression. Some of the poems are savage attacks on other writers, some are obscene and profane, but some reveal the emergence of genius. Paris 1922 , for example, is an exercise in writing that Hemingway described in A Moveable Feast ( 1964 ):

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

The prose poem is written in six sections, each one beginning with the words “I have.” The fifth section reads: “I have seen the one-legged street walker who works / the Boulevard Madelaine between the Rue Cambon / and Bernheim Jeune's limping along the pavement / through the crowd on a rainy night with a beefy / red-faced Episcopal clergyman holding an umbrella / over her.” This, of course, became the foundation for one of Hemingway's best short stories, Cat in the Rain . Although Hemingway wrote poems throughout his life, the majority of them were written during his youth in Paris. Of the eighty-eight poems that were collected and published in 1979 , seventy-three were written before A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929 .

Crucial to Hemingway's development as a prose writer was his relationship with Gertrude Stein. Stein was the arbiter of art and literature in Paris, and her Left Bank apartment, shared with her companion, Alice B. Toklas , was a mecca for young artists and writers. Her own rules of writing were so eccentric as to make her work almost indecipherable, and she did not have any direct influence on Hemingway's style, which had already been developed through journalism. She read his work and made suggested improvements, but more important to the struggling writer, she took him seriously and included him in her circle of established authors. Stein is credited with dubbing those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five as the Lost Generation . She, however, claimed that she heard the phrase used by an innkeeper who was bemoaning the lost opportunities those who went to the horrors of World War I would never experience. In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway wrote that she heard it used by an auto mechanic who was berating a young assistant. Whatever the origin of the descriptive phrase, Hemingway made it Stein's forever by attributing it to her in one of the epigraphs to The Sun Also Rises ( 1926 ).

In addition to Stein's salon, Hemingway frequented Sylvia Beach 's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company . The shop, which opened in 1919 , had an extensive lending library and was a meeting place for French, American, and British writers. Beach was their friend, confidant, banker, postmaster, tireless promoter, and often their publisher. Her crowning achievement was the publication of the first complete edition of James Joyce 's Ulysses in 1922 when publishers in America and Britain were facing arrest on obscenity charges for publishing portions of the massive work. Beach wrote in her history of the shop that Hemingway was “my best customer,” often borrowing armloads of books at a time: Dostoyevsky , Tolstoy , Turgenev , and Chekhov . Hemingway wrote of Beach, “She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

Trying to follow Hemingway's movements during this part of his life is very difficult; he was constantly in motion. During the rainy season in Paris, he and Hadley liked to go to Switzerland or Austria to enjoy the snow and skiing. On the advice of Stein, they traveled to Spain where, on 30 May 1923 , in the town of Aranjuez, Hemingway saw his first bullfight. The spectacle made a tremendous emotional impact on Hemingway; so strong was his reaction that he found that he could not write about it. He explained the problem in Death in the Afternoon ( 1932 ):

the bullfight was so far from simple and I liked it so much that it was much too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with and, aside from four very short sketches, I was not able to write anything about it for five years—and I wish I would have waited ten.

The best bullfights were to be found beginning on 6 July in Pamplona during the six-day Fiesta San Fermin that has been held since 1126. The fiesta is primarily a religious holiday featuring holy processions and pilgrimages in honor of Christian martyr Saint Fermin. Fermin was beheaded, and during the fiesta red kerchiefs are worn around the neck in remembrance of this. The most well-known event of the fiesta is the daily running of the bulls through the city's streets to the holding corrals at the bullring. For the past several decades, tourists who mistakenly believe they are emulating Hemingway have risked injury or death by running ahead of the charging beasts. Hemingway observed the event many times but never participated.

In addition to these pleasure trips, Hemingway traveled to cover events for the Toronto Daily Star : Constantinople to report on the Greco-Turkish War, Lausanne for the Peace Conference, Germany to observe the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr Valley, and Genoa for the International Economic Conference. One wonders how Hemingway found the time to write fiction. What he had managed to produce was lost when Hadley's suitcase containing several short stories and the beginning of a novel was stolen at the Gare de Lyon as she was leaving to join her husband in Switzerland on 2 December 1922 . Two stories survived, however: My Old Man which had been rejected by Cosmopolitan magazine and was in the mail, and Up in Michigan , which Hemingway had thrown into a desk drawer after Gertrude Stein had pronounced it inaccrochable , not for public viewing. These two and another story he wrote in Italy in April 1923 , Out of Season , plus ten poems were published by Robert McAlmon 's Contact Press in Paris as Three Stories and Ten Poems ( 1923 ).

Hemingway's first book was a slim volume of only sixty-four pages. Three hundred copies were printed in its first, and only, edition and sold for two dollars each. At a March 2002 auction at Swann Galleries in New York, an inscribed copy sold for $52,900. In what would seem to be open defiance of Stein's opinion, Hemingway selected Up in Michigan to be the first story. It is set in Hortons (Horton) Bay, a small town in northern Michigan that Hemingway knew well. Liz Coates, a romantic young girl, works for Mrs. Smith in what the reader assumes is a restaurant, although it is never identified as such. Liz is silently but overwhelmingly attracted to the town blacksmith, Jim Gilmore . She lies awake at night thinking about his body, remembering how he looks when he washes in the outdoor washbasin. (Liz's musings are remarkably similar to those of another young woman, Connie Chatterley, who shocked the world five years later in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover .) When Jim and two other men prepare to go deer hunting, Liz considers making him something special to eat on the trip but shyly and fearfully decides not to. When the men return she feels excited and weak. The men take their dinner at the Smith house and get drunk on the remains of their hunting whiskey. Jim seeks out Liz in the kitchen and begins to grope and kiss her. Liz is frightened but follows him down a path to the dock where he drunkenly and brutally rapes her and falls asleep on her violated body. Tears of pain join tears of disillusionment as she extricates herself from under his inert weight. She places her coat over Jim to protect him from the damp night air and returns to the Smiths'. “She was cold and miserable and everything felt gone.”

Out of Season concerns a young gentleman and his wife who are staying at a hotel in Cortina, Italy. The young gentleman (this is the sole way Hemingway refers to him the thirty-seven times he is mentioned) has engaged the services of a drunken local, Peduzzi, to show him and his wife, Tiny, the best spot to do some illegal, out-of-season, trout fishing. As the fishing party proceeds through the streets of Cortina, the couple becomes reluctant to continue. Tiny finally returns to the hotel, disgusted by her husband's spineless inability to simply dismiss the drunken fool and cancel the agreement. At the river, Peduzzi discovers that they lack a vital piece of fishing gear and arranges with the young gentleman to meet again tomorrow morning. The young gentleman gives Peduzzi money to buy supplies for tomorrow but admits, “I may not be going.”

My Old Man is told by a young boy named Joe who, along with his father, a steeplechase jockey named Butler, travels through Europe pursuing racetrack wins. The boy has a deep love for his father and is excited about their future after Butler wins enough money to buy his own horse, Gilford. At the Auteuil racetrack in Paris, Gilford stumbles at a water jump and Butler is killed. Gilford suffers a broken leg and is shot. Joe is left nothing but the good memories of his beloved father. But even that is taken from him when he overhears two men cursing his father as a crook who got what he deserved. Joe is stunned to learn that he is the only person on the racing circuit who is unaware of his father's dishonesty. Even though another jockey tries to reverse the damage, Joe ends his story by realizing the totality of his loss: “Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing.”

The ten poems in this volume are of minor interest. Indeed, when Edmund Wilson reviewed the work in the October 1924 issue of The Dial , he wrote that the poems were “not particularly important.” That has remained the opinion of most Hemingway scholars; however, poetry remained an important means of expression for Hemingway all his life and his work in this art will perhaps one day receive the critical attention it deserves. Two of the poems present some insight into the twenty-four-year-old Hemingway, however. Along With Youth is a farewell; “…Piles of old magazines, / Drawers of boy's letters / And the line of love / They must have ended somewhere. / Yesterday's Tribune is gone / Along with youth.…” And in Roosevelt , a tribute to his boyhood hero, Teddy Roosevelt, are these lines that give the reader an eerie sensation of things to come in Hemingway's life: “And all the legends that he started in his life / Live on and prosper, / Unhampered now by his existence.”

Hadley was several months pregnant and Hemingway reluctantly agreed to have their child born in America. In late August 1923 , the couple left Paris and settled in Toronto, Hemingway working full time for the Toronto Daily Star . Their son, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway , was born on 10 October, and although Hemingway loved “Bumby” all his life, the boy's arrival was untimely and added stress to an already tense marriage. The role of full-time breadwinner and father left little time for writing fiction. In late December, he took Gertrude Stein's advice and quit the Star and moved his family back to Paris. Released from his journalistic duties, Hemingway threw himself into writing short stories, producing enough to publish a collection of sixteen entitled In Our Time ( 1925 ). Another volume with the same title (in lower case, however) was published in 1924 . It is a collection of eighteen vignettes, the longest amounting to only 282 words. These exercises in writing short, declarative sentences, similar to the exercises in Paris 1922 , were used as interchapters in the 1925 collection.

In Our Time is not only a masterpiece in terms of writing, it is a masterpiece of arrangement as well. Each story is indirectly a piece of a larger picture, rather like a Cubist painting. The collection begins, after a brief vignette about the Greco-Turkish War and one of the interchapters from the 1924 volume, with Indian Camp . A doctor is called to an Indian camp across the lake from his summer cabin to assist a woman who is having difficulty delivering her baby. With him are his brother, George, and his young son, Nick. The woman has been in labor for two days and her screams fill the air. The doctor assures Nick that the screams are unimportant and does for the woman what he must do under the primitive circumstances. Not having any anesthetic, he instructs some Indians and George to hold the woman in place, performs a cesarian section with his pocketknife, delivers a healthy baby boy, and sews up the incision with fishing leaders. Feeling very happy with his work, the doctor attempts to rouse the baby's father who has been lying silently in the upper bunk. When the doctor pulls his blanket back he finds that the man, unable to endure his wife's suffering, has cut his throat and bled to death. The doctor tells his brother to take Nick outside but it is too late; Nick has seen the man's wound. As they row back across the lake, the doctor voices his regrets at taking his son to the Indian camp. Nick, however, who has experienced firsthand the adult mysteries of birth and death, seems unscarred by his initiation. The doctor answers his son's questions patiently and honestly. Sitting in the boat with his father, the sun rising and bass jumping, Nick in youthful confidence feels quite sure that he will never die. Indeed, Nick does not die. Hemingway allowed his autobiographical counterpart to live on through eleven more stories and have a son of his own. The achingly beautiful Fathers and Sons , first published in Winner Take Nothing ( 1933 ), is the last of the Nick Adams stories and presents a thirty-eight-year-old Nick who is reminiscing about his father, and what he was taught by him, while driving on a Sunday toward some unnamed destination. Nick's young son sleeps beside him on the front seat and, as if he were dreaming about his father's remembrances, wakes up and asks Nick, “What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?”

The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife is another father and son story. The doctor has backed down from a physical confrontation with some Ojibway Indians he has hired to cut logs. He walks to his home where he is further humiliated by his wife and escapes to the solace of the woods. He finds his son reading under a tree and tells him that his mother wants him to come home. Nick, in an almost heartbreaking display of love and support for his father, says that he would rather go with him. “All right. Come on then,” his father said. “Give me the book, I'll put it in my pocket.” “I know where there's black squirrels, Daddy,” Nick said. “All right,” said his father. “Let's go there.”

The next three stories follow an older Nick as he breaks off a romance ( The End of Something ), suffers through the aftermath with the aid of liquor and a sympathetic friend ( The Three-Day Blow ), and stumbles upon a punch-drunk boxer and his kind-hearted companion after being thrown from a train ( The Battler ). A Very Short Story is an expanded version of a vignette from the 1924 collection and recalls Hemingway's anguish over the loss of Agnes von Kurowsky. Soldiers Home reveals what many soldiers faced when they returned home from the horrific battlefields of World War I. A sharp contrast is shown between the life Krebs returned to in the previous story and the life of a young Hungarian soldier traveling through postwar Europe in another expanded vignette, The Revolutionist .

The next four stories, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot , Cat in the Rain , Out of Season , and Cross-Country Snow , are brilliant portrayals of marital discord from various points of view. My Old Man fits in at this point by taking the reader back to the father-and-son relationship of the first two stories. Finally, after dealing with suicide, humiliation, rejection, drunkenness, insanity, and parental and marital problems, Nick takes a fishing trip alone in Hemingway's undisputed masterpiece of detailed observation, Big Two-Hearted River . The importance of this two-part story cannot be overemphasized. Not only does it present Hemingway at the height of his descriptive powers, it offers a tribute to a way of coping with life's difficulties that Hemingway was about to lose forever. “It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.” Hemingway would search for the rest of his life for the solitary peace and simple happiness that Nick enjoys along the river.

Pauline and the Early Novels

The New York publishing house of Boni and Liveright published In Our Time and signed Hemingway to a three-book contract. After the contract had been signed, however, Hemingway received a letter that had been waiting for him at Shakespeare and Company while he was away in Austria. The letter was an offer from the now-legendary editor at Charles Scribner's Sons , Maxwell Perkins . Perkins wrote that F. Scott Fitzgerald , whose The Great Gatsby had recently been published by Scribners, had recommended that Perkins should approach Hemingway about signing with his house. Scribners certainly was a more prestigious publisher than Boni and Liveright, and it is suggested by many Hemingway scholars that he wrote The Torrents of Spring ( 1926 ) knowing that the blatant parody of Boni and Liveright's best-selling author, Sherwood Anderson, would be refused and he would be released from his contract. There may be some truth in this, since everyone in Hemingway's growing circle thought the book was cruel, vicious, a betrayal of Anderson who had done much to help the young writer, and not worthy of the author of In Our Time . Everyone, that is, except Pauline Pfeiffer . Pauline was a stylish young woman from Piggott, Arkansas, who was working for the Paris edition of Vogue magazine when she became friends with Hemingway and Hadley. She found The Torrents of Spring to be a splendid piece and encouraged Hemingway to publish it. Her support, beauty, family wealth, and freedom from domestic responsibilities attracted Hemingway and widened the growing gap between him and Hadley.

Hemingway met with Horace Liveright on 9 February 1926 in New York and brought an end to their contractual agreement. The next day, Hemingway met with Max Perkins at Scribners and signed a contract for publication of Torrents and a novel Hemingway had begun in July, The Sun Also Rises ( 1926 ). When Hemingway returned to Paris, he spent two days celebrating with Pauline before joining his wife in Austria. “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” Hemingway wrote movingly of the pleasure and pain of these days in the final chapter of A Moveable Feast :

an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then knowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One of them is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.Then, instead of the two of them and their child, there are three of them. First it is stimulating and fun and it goes on that way for a while. All things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.

The daily war became too much for Hadley and she agreed to divorce Hemingway. It was during this time of emotional upheaval that Scribners published The Sun Also Rises .

The novel takes a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes as its title. Following the epigraph from Gertrude Stein, “You are all a lost generation,” Hemingway inserted a second epigraph, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.” It is Hemingway's purpose to present honestly the devastating effects of World War I on a generation represented by his characters. Jake Barnes, the novel's narrator, is a veteran of the war and has suffered an unspecified wound that has rendered him impotent. The wound is important to an understanding of the novel in that it represents a physical manifestation of what the other characters suffer emotionally; an inability to participate fully in life.

Book 1 of the novel presents the festive façade of life in Paris during the 1920s. Jake and his friend, Robert Cohn, run into Brett Ashley at a dance club filled with people who are seeking some sort of satisfaction through loud music, frenetic movement, and bottles of champagne. Jake knew Brett when she was a nurse in England. It is obvious that the two love each other and suffer greatly because of Jake's wound. Brett lost her first husband to dysentery during the war and is waiting for her divorce from her second husband, Lord Ashley, to become final before she weds Mike Campbell, her bankrupt, Scottish fiancé. Brett is sexually insatiable and takes the hopelessly smitten Robert with her for a two-week stay in San Sebastian, a seaside resort on the border between France and Spain. When they return in book 2, Bill Gorton, a friend of Jake's, and Mike Campbell have arrived in Paris. Jake and Bill leave for the fiesta in Pamplona and stop for a few days of trout fishing in Burguette. Robert had intended to go with them but decides instead to wait for Brett who has gone back to San Sebastian, this time with Mike. The pathetic Robert is incapable of accepting the fact that Brett wants nothing further to do with him and endures the drunken derision of Jake, Mike, and Bill to be close to her.

All the characters come together in Pamplona and enjoy a week of drinking and attending the bullfights. Hemingway, through Jake, displays his remarkable knowledge of the life and death struggle that happens within the bullring. Jake introduces Brett to a dashing young matador, Pedro Romero. Brett's attraction to the nineteen-year-old boy is more than Robert can bear. He erupts in violence, using the skills he learned on the boxing team at Princeton, and knocks Jake unconscious and knocks Mike down. His rage carries him to Pedro's hotel room where he injures the boy badly. Pedro pulls himself together enough to give a brilliant show in the bullring the next afternoon before leaving for Madrid with Brett.

Book 3 opens with Jake, Bill, and Mike leaving Pamplona. They hire a car to take them to Bayonne. Bill takes the train to Paris, Mike goes to the resort town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Jake retreats to San Sebastian for six days of rest, relaxation, and recuperation. While there, he receives a desperate telegram from Brett begging him to come to Madrid: “Could you come Hotel Montana Madrid am rather in trouble Brett.” He arrives in Madrid to find that Brett has sent Pedro away and has decided to return to Mike. The sexual tension between Jake and Brett is unbearable and they try to drown their frustrations and disappointments in endless martinis and white wine. Hemingway ends the novel with Brett and Jake taking a taxi ride through Madrid.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic.He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Nothing is resolved and the reader finds himself back at the beginning with little reason to be optimistic about the lives of any of the characters. The small hope that Hemingway expresses is found in the second epigram: the sun will rise again on another generation and perhaps they will find some purpose in this seemingly purposeless postwar world.

The novel was a tremendous success, not only among Hemingway's friends who enjoyed trying to match his characters with those within their circle, but with everyone who had experienced the moral and spiritual vacuum that existed in Europe after the war. Scribners published a first edition of 5,090 copies that sold for two dollars each; it has never been out of print. In the divorce agreement, Hadley gained custody of Bumby and the royalties from the novel, which was dedicated to both of them.

On 10 May 1927 , Hemingway married Pauline in Paris. In October, Scribners published a collection of Hemingway's short stories, many of which had already been published in Scribner's Magazine , entitled Men without Women . Their faith in their new author is suggested by the fact that they published a first edition of 7,650 copies. The young man who had come to Paris on 20 December 1921 to become a writer left the city on 17 March 1928 after publishing six books and gaining the respect of a major American publishing house. With his new wife he sailed for Key West, Florida, where he began work on A Farewell to Arms ( 1929 ).

Frederic Henry, who, like Hemingway, was an American volunteer ambulance driver in World War I Italy, tells the story. Frederic begins his reminiscences with some of the most memorable opening lines in American literature:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

Frederic's ambulance corps was assigned to a British medical unit in northeast Italy where heavy fighting was expected. Catherine Barkley, an English nurse whose fiancé of eight years has been killed in France, was attracted to Frederic but also repulsed by his immaturity and insensitivity. The battle along the northern front intensified and Frederic was wounded.

I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh—then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out.

Frederic was sent to the American Hospital in Milan where Catherine had been transferred, and, now that Frederic had gained some insight into the horrors of war and himself, their romance intensified. Frederic was returned to the front after several months of physical rehabilitation and was involved in the hideous retreat from Caporetto. As his unit approached the Tagliamento River, they were stopped by Italian military policemen who picked out officers to be executed as deserters. Frederic jumped into the river and escaped into his “separate peace.” He found Catherine in Stretsa and the two rowed the twenty-one miles across Lake Maggiore to Switzerland. Frederic enjoyed an idyllic life with Catherine and awaited the birth of their child. At the hospital in Lausanne, however, the baby was stillborn after a prolonged labor and cesarian section and Catherine, whose hemorrhaging could not be stopped, died. Frederic was left alone, his disillusionment complete, to “walk back to the hotel in the rain.”

Once again Hemingway captured the frustrations and anxieties of postwar Europe. Indeed, A Farewell to Arms seems a prequel to The Sun Also Rises ; one can imagine Frederic going on to the sort of purposeless life led by Jake in the previous novel. The public responded wildly to this story of two lovers damaged by events they neither caused nor were able to avoid. Scribner's Magazine serialized the novel in six parts from May through October 1929 and published a first edition of 31,050 copies. The elation of his first commercial success was dampened by the news Hemingway received on 6 December 1928 , that his father had shot and killed himself after suffering a long illness and some financial difficulties.

The year 1930 marked the beginning of a rapid decline in Hemingway, both physically and artistically. His drinking increased and led to a series of accidents; his literary output, which had been prodigious during the 1920s, began to slow down. His success created celebrity and Pauline's money made the enjoyment of it possible. The simple pleasures of solitary hunting and trout fishing in Northern Michigan and Paris graduated to the public spectacles of big-game hunting in Montana and Africa and lengthy fishing expeditions in the Gulf Stream aboard his boat, the Pilar . His growing family (sons Patrick and Gregory were born to Hemingway and Pauline in 1928 and 1931 , respectively), his need to take care of his widowed mother and siblings, and his own desire to hold his place among readers would interrupt his adventures and send him back to his pencils and paper. But like all true writers Hemingway never stopped writing, even when it appeared he was playing. His enjoyment of the bullfights in Pamplona, which he continued to attend with Pauline, led to his writing what is considered the best book on the subject written by a non-Spaniard, Death in the Afternoon ( 1932 ). In addition, his 1933–1934 African safari produced Green Hills of Africa ( 1935 ). Both are splendid examples of Hemingway's ability to entertain and instruct through the use of seemingly simple nonfiction prose.

During the 1930s, Hemingway continued to write short stories that, for the most part, were published in Scribner's Magazine and expand upon his themes of loss and disillusionment. A collection of these was published in 1933 as Winner Take Nothing . A short story written in 1936 , The Snows of Kilimanjaro , gives evidence of the deterioration of his marriage to Pauline and the fear that he was losing his talent. Indeed, during the early part of 1936 , Hemingway suffered from serious depression and insomnia, and he considered suicide. His counterpart in the story, Harry, has come to Africa with his wealthy wife, Helen, to try to recapture, in the place “where he had been happiest in the good time of his life,” his ability to write well. He has injured his leg and gangrene has set in. As he and Helen wait for a plane from Nairobi that will carry them to a hospital, Harry recalls, in a series of flashbacks, experiences he has saved to write stories about but knows he will not live to complete. As he drifts in and out of delirium, which his nonstop drinking heightens, he berates Helen who patiently tries to make him as comfortable as she can. In his interior monologue he thinks of her as “this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of talent.” He quickly reverses and blames himself: “He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions.…”

As if to prove his self-assessment correct, Hemingway combined two stories that had been published in Cosmopolitan and Esquire and a third unpublished piece into a novel that is considered an utter failure, To Have and Have Not ( 1937 ). This novel, his first in eight years, is Hemingway's attempt to display a social consciousness regarding the devastating effects of the Depression, but the contrast between the “haves” and the “have nots” in Key West is erratic and uneven and lacks the lyricism of his earlier work.

Martha and the Wars in Europe

In The Snows of Kilimanjaro , which reads like a bad fever dream, Hemingway, with brutal honesty about himself and his situation, announces the death of his life with Pauline. Hemingway began to spend more time fishing with his friends and drinking at Sloppy Joe's Bar. The outbreak of civil war in his beloved Spain roused Hemingway from his self-indulgent stupor and he signed an agreement with the North American News Alliance in November 1936 to send dispatches from the war-torn country. In late December 1936 , Hemingway met the woman who would become his third wife, journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn ( 1908–1998 ). Hemingway had read her first novel, What Mad Pursuit ( 1934 ), and was greatly attracted to the young blonde writer. By January 1937 , Hemingway was reporting from besieged Madrid with Martha at his side.

Throughout 1937 and 1938 , Hemingway traveled between Spain and America promoting the Loyalist cause. He helped in the production of a short film about the effects of the war in Spain on its people, The Spanish Earth , and made many publicity and fund-raising appearances. His play, the three-act The Fifth Column ( 1938 ), a story of counterespionage in Madrid featuring barely disguised portrayals of Hemingway and Martha in the characters of Philip Rawlings and Dorothy Bridges, was published in 1938 together with a collection of previously published short stories. The play did not present the horrors of the civil war as successfully as seven short stories written during this period: The Denunciation , The Butterfly and the Tank , The Night Before the Battle , Old Man at the Bridge , Nobody Ever Dies , Under the Ridge , and Landscape with Figures . Elements of each of these splendid portraits of human dignity and courage enter into Hemingway's fourth novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls ( 1940 ).

Robert Jordan, an American college professor, has come to Spain to volunteer his services to those fighting against the fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Jordan is assigned to deliver explosives to a band of guerilla fighters who, after successfully blowing up a train, have been hiding in the mountains near Segovia for the past three months. The self-proclaimed leader of the peasant patriots is Pablo , but Jordan learns that the true strength and authority lies in Pablo's woman, Pilar. With them are seven other men and a young woman, Maria, whom they had rescued from the blown-up train. Fascist soldiers had entered Maria's hometown and killed her mother and father along with many others. Maria and several of the younger women had had their heads shaved and had been gang-raped before being put on the train. With Pilar's help, Maria has recovered enough physically and psychologically to become Jordan's lover. Through her story and the stories of Pilar and the others, Jordan learns much about the capabilities of men and women at war with their countrymen. He learns that both factions commit acts of betrayal and brutality; indeed, the most horrific murders are at the hands of the very people Jordan has joined. Hemingway's relentless honesty about the viciousness and stupidity of both factions earned him some negative responses from leftists who regarded his honesty as anticommunist. Indeed, Hemingway was anticommunist as well as antifascist and all other party lines. His concern was with the individual and how that individual lives and dies within a code of honor, honesty, dignity, and grace.

At the novel's end, Jordan is lying on the pine-needled floor of the forest, as he was in chapter 1. He and the band have carried out their mission and the bridge has been destroyed. As they retreat from fascist soldiers, Jordan's horse is shot and in its fall crushes Jordan's leg. Unable to continue, he sends the others away and stays behind with a machine gun to stall the advancing troops. This is the point where Jordan's true war begins: the war between his desire to escape his pain and torment through suicide, and his desire to hold out against the soldiers long enough that the remaining guerillas might reach safety. It must be remembered that in his almost Christ-like sacrifice, Jordan dies not only for Maria but for the treacherous Pablo as well.

In April 1939 , Hemingway packed all his belongings that were in Key West and sailed the Pilar to Havana, Cuba. He moved into a large farmhouse that Martha had found just outside of the city. The property, Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), would be Hemingway's base of operations for the next twenty years. Hemingway married Martha on 21 November 1940 . The honeymoon was soon over, however, as their competitiveness and professional jealousies made for a very difficult marriage. Martha was as ambitious as she was talented and she accepted assignments that took her far from home. Sometimes Hemingway accompanied her, as he did during her trip to cover the Sino-Japanese War, but more often he was content to stay in Cuba enjoying the success of For Whom the Bell Tolls , deep-sea fishing on the Pilar with friends, and drinking.

His envy reached a breaking point when Martha received an assignment to cover the war in Europe for Collier's . After brooding and drinking for nearly six months while his wife was on the front lines, Hemingway agreed to write for Collier's and effectively upstaged Martha, who was given other duties by the magazine. He arrived in London on 17 May 1941 and witnessed the D-Day landing aboard a correspondents' transport ship on 6 June 1944 . Because of his celebrity he was afforded special treatment not usually granted members of the press corps: permission to fly on Royal Air Force bombing missions and, through General Charles Trueman Lanham , a car, weapons, and a small troop of irregulars whom he led on reconnaissance patrols. His little army was one of the first to enter Paris on 25 August 1944 . Hemingway commandeered the Ritz Hotel and its bar and sought out old friends who had stayed in Paris during the Nazi occupation: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach.

Mary and the Final Years

With him at the Ritz was an American reporter he had met in London, Mary Welsh . In temperament Mary was everything Martha was not: passive, adoring, indulgent, and endlessly forgiving. Hemingway's fiery five-year marriage to Martha came to a legal end on 21 December 1945 , and he married Mary on 14 March 1946 in Havana.

The tumultuous decade of 1940 saw only one major work by Hemingway. In 1946 he had begun work on The Garden of Eden ( 1986 ) and in 1948 Islands in the Stream ( 1970 ), but, as 1950 approached, the reading public was hoping for a novel of World War II that would rival A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls . What they got was the terribly disappointing Across the River and into the Trees ( 1950 ). The title is derived from the dying words of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson , “Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees.” The story concerns another dying general (now demoted to colonel because of a blunder he committed resulting in the loss of several men under his command), fifty-year-old Richard Cantwell, who, aware of death's rapid approach, has bluffed his way through an army physical in order to spend his last days doing what he loved most: duck hunting on the Tagliamento River near Venice, dining at the Gritti Palace Hotel, drinking at Harry's Bar, and loving an eighteen-year-old countess, Renata. In the few hours left to him, Cantwell reminisces about his life and loves. It is a tender story with masterful descriptions of Venice, but Hemingway loses control of his style, often in ways that result in self-parody. The reviews were scathing and called into question the entirety of Hemingway's work. Stung by this and the fact that the Nobel Prize for literature had been awarded to William Faulkner the previous year, Hemingway reworked an essay he had written in 1936 for Esquire magazine, On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter . The resulting work was the last novel published in his lifetime and the one that restored and solidified his reputation for all time, The Old Man and the Sea ( 1952 ).

The small book, barely 27,000 words, is the very essence of the Hemingway style: a simple story told with detailed accuracy and close attention to natural beauty. Santiago is an old, expert fisherman living in poverty in Cuba. His wife has died and his only company is a young boy, Manolin, who lives in the village with his parents and helps Santiago with his fishing gear and brings him food and coffee. Santiago has not caught a fish in eighty-four days but Manolin reminds him he once went eighty-seven days without a catch before his luck changed. Santiago, who follows the New York Yankees baseball team closely, knows that his team has just won their eighty-fourth game of the season and one more win would put them in a tie for first place. He sees this as a guarantee that his eighty-fifth day out on the water will result in a good catch for him. Indeed, at noon the next day Santiago hooks an enormous marlin that pulls his sixteen-foot skiff far out into the Gulf Stream. United in their determination to survive, sharing physical torments in the struggle, man and fish fight for two days until the fish is finally killed by Santiago's harpoon. He lashes the eighteen-foot marlin to his skiff and sails for shore. After an hour the first of several Mako sharks attacks Santiago's catch. The old man fights them off with what strength he has left but the sharks prevail and when he arrives at his village the night of his third day out, only the marlin's skeleton remains tied to his skiff. The next morning gawking tourists who think the bones are that of a shark misunderstand the gruesome sight and the struggle it represents. In the novel's final scene, Manolin sits by the old man who is sleeping and dreaming of the lions he once saw playing on an African coast when he was a young sailor.

The novel contains several elements of Christian imagery: Santiago's cry as the fishing cord cuts into his hands is described as the sort of cry a man might make as he feels “the nail go through his hand and into the wood,” and the image of Santiago struggling to his home carrying his mast on his back and finally lying down in the form of a crucified man. Some see the novel as an allegory of Hemingway's life's work: the struggle and determination to go farther than anyone has gone to catch/create the greatest fish/body of work only to have it destroyed by sharks/critics and misunderstood by tourists/readers. But the true wealth of the story is found in its simple, straightforward presentation of the tragic dignity of all living things. Santiago is Hemingway's finest example of everyone who has struggled and lost and risen to the challenge again. As he struggles with the sharks, he voices and exemplifies the belief that sustains all of Hemingway's protagonists, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” The small book earned Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and is thought to be directly responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 .

In spite of the literary accolades, Hemingway was a seriously troubled man in the final years of his life. Like Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro , he attempted to reclaim his artistic abilities by returning to the places where he was at his best. He arrived in Pamplona with Mary in the summer of 1953 and from there went on a disastrous and near-fatal African safari that involved two plane crashes in two days. He recuperated in Venice from his several severe injuries before returning to Cuba in June 1954 . In 1956 , he returned to Europe where, the legend has it, he found two footlockers he had stored at the Ritz Hotel in Paris when he had left for Key West in 1928 . The footlockers contained notebooks that were filled with Hemingway's observations of his life in Paris as a young man. He began to organize and rewrite these reminiscences in 1957 but was unable to complete the project to his satisfaction during his lifetime. Mary, with the assistance of Hemingway's friend, A. E. Hotchner , gathered the material and had it published as A Moveable Feast ( 1964 ). With its romanticized portrayal of his years with Hadley and its gossipy and often cruel comments on his circle of fellow expatriates, it quickly became the most popular of Hemingway's nonfiction books.

In 1959 , Hemingway and Mary spent the summer in Spain following a pair of young matadors who were staging mano a mano bullfights across the country. The pace of travel in the summer heat was exhausting and Hemingway fortified himself with ever-increasing amounts of alcohol. The tour became a debacle in which a constantly drunken Hemingway showed signs of severe mental illness. His book that chronicled this trip was indeed well titled, The Dangerous Summer ( 1985 ).

Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic under a false name on 30 November 1960 and remained there until 22 January 1961 . He was treated for a long list of problems including diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, hypertension, paranoia, and severe depression. Electro-shock therapy was administered and, while it relieved some of the depression, it damaged his memory. Hemingway was released to Mary's care and they went to their home in Ketchum, Idaho. Ketchum is located near Sun Valley, an area Hemingway loved the first time he saw it with Martha in 1939 . The house he and Mary bought there in 1959 is rather grim and forbidding but the views of the Sawtooth Mountains are spectacular. Here Hemingway struggled to organize his Paris sketches. Increasingly frustrated, Hemingway attempted suicide twice in late April. He was returned to the Mayo Clinic under heavy sedation on 25 April and endured more electroshock therapy. Against Mary's advice, the clinic released Hemingway on 26 June and he returned to Ketchum. Early Sunday morning on 2 July 1961 , while Mary slept upstairs, Hemingway unlocked a storage room and retrieved his Boss double-barreled shotgun. In the foyer of his home he put the barrels to his head and pulled the trigger.

Mary tried to convince the press that the shooting was accidental but no one other than she believed that Hemingway would have been cleaning a loaded shotgun at seven-thirty on a Sunday morning. The funeral service, held at Ketchum Cemetery on 6 July, was small and private. A simple plot-length stone bearing his full name and birth and death dates marks Hemingway's grave. Along the road to Sun Valley there stands a stone pedestal bearing a bronze bust of Hemingway. These words from a eulogy that Hemingway wrote for his friend Gene Van Guilder in 1939 are inscribed on a plaque at the base of the pedestal: “Best of all he loved the fall / The yellow leaves on the cottonwoods / Leaves floating on the trout streams / And above the hills / The high blue windless skies / Now he will be a part of them forever.”

Hemingway in Our Time

Hemingway's reputation has survived several attempts to dismantle it. He was reviled as a war monger addicted to blood sports in the peace movement years of the 1960s; he was held up as a perfect example of a male chauvinist pig during the women's liberation movement of the 1970s; and even in the new millennium some library occasionally finds it necessary to ban one or more of his books. For the most part, however, an industry has grown up based on the man and his work. Manuscripts left incomplete at the time of his death have been heavily edited by friends or family members and then published as Hemingway's work: A Moveable Feast ( 1964 ), Islands in the Stream ( 1970 ), The Dangerous Summer ( 1985 ), The Garden of Eden ( 1986 ), and True at First Light ( 1999 ).

Seminars and conferences on Hemingway are held in many parts of the world every year. New biographies and critical studies appear regularly in bookstores. Annual festivals, featuring events that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, are held in Oak Park and Key West. Tourists still risk life and limb in Pamplona every July because of a book Hemingway wrote more than seventy years ago. Hemingway Web sites abound. Hemingway's centennial year, 1999 , saw an incredible outpouring of mass-produced items—clothing, hunting and fishing equipment, home furnishings, postage stamps, and even a Hemingway cookbook—all claiming to convey the spirit of the man.

What is sometimes lost in all of this frenetic adoration and commercial enterprise is the reason anyone remembers Hemingway at all—his work and how it affected literature. There are few modern writers who can assert that Ernest Hemingway taught them nothing. Ann Beattie , Reynolds Price , Andre Dubus , Jim Harrison , Joyce Carol Oates —the list is endless—readily confess that Hemingway was and is of vital importance to their art. Our language is filled with descriptive phrases that originated with Hemingway: “grace under pressure,” “a clean, well-lighted place,” “a moveable feast.” His influence is indeed pervasive and unavoidable. It is said in jest, although it may very well be the truth, that 50 percent of writers try hard to write like Hemingway and the other 50 percent try hard not to.

The secret of Hemingway's endurance as a storyteller is that he invites the active participation of the reader in the creation of the story. Everyone will read a Hemingway piece differently based on his or her own life experiences. This is true of many writers but particularly of Hemingway who purposely stripped his sentences of detailed description. In 1932 he wrote of his theory of omission, popularly known as the “iceberg theory,” in Death in the Afternoon :

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Writing in simple, crisp, clear declarative sentences Hemingway made the work of writing look easy, to the dismay of many would-be authors. He set the standard of performance for all writers in these words written in a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1954 , “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”

Despite all the biographies and studies of Hemingway and all he has told us about himself and his art, he remains enigmatic. He is one of the most photographed writers since Mark Twain , but the abundance of images create more questions about the man than they answer. He appears equally content holding a machine gun or holding one of his many cats; posing with a huge marlin he has caught or with his infant first child; drinking wine from a bota at the bullfights or working on a manuscript in Idaho. Perhaps James Joyce summed up all we really need to know about Hemingway when he told a Danish interviewer, Ole Vinding , in 1936 :

He's a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is. He's a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway's form than people know.

See also Anderson, Sherwood ; Beattie, Ann ; Fitzgerald, F. Scott ; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) ; Lowell, Amy ; Oates, Joyce Carol ; and Stein, Gertrude .

• Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
• in our time (1924)
• In Our Time: Stories (1925)
• The Torrents of Spring (1926)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• Men without Women (1927)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• Death in the Afternoon (1932)
• Winner Take Nothing (1933)
• Green Hills of Africa (1935)
• To Have and Have Not (1937)
• The Fifth Column, and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• A Moveable Feast (1964)
• Islands in the Stream (1970)
• The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
• The Dangerous Summer (1985)
• The Garden of Eden (1986)
• The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
• True at First Light (1999)

Further Reading

• Baker, Carlos . Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story . New York, 1969. A standard biography, approved by Mary Hemingway. Excellent source for specific dates.
• Baker, Carlos . Hemingway: The Writer as Artist . 4th ed. Princeton, N.J., 1972. A reprint of the first critical study of Hemingway, originally published in 1952.
• Baker, Carlos . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 . New York, 1981.
• Bloom, Harold , ed. Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway . New York, 1985. Splendid collection of essays by such writers as Reynolds Price and Robert Penn Warren. It also includes the complete Paris Review interview conducted by George Plimpton in 1958.
• Brian, Denis . The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him . New York, 1988. “The true gen” was a phrase Hemingway picked up in World War II and used often—it means “the real thing” or “the genuine fact.”
• Burrill, William . Hemingway: The Toronto Years . Toronto, 1994.
• Donaldson, Scott . The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway . New York, 1996. “Hemingway's Late Fiction: Breaking New Ground,” by Robert E. Fleming, is a very good appraisal of Hemingway's final works.
• Fenton, Charles A. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years . New York, 1975.
• Gerogiannis, Nicholas , ed. Complete Poems . Rev. ed. Lincoln, Nebr., 1992. Originally published as Ernest Hemingway: 88 Poems in 1979, this revised edition includes an insightful afterword.
• Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir . New York, 1999. Hemingway's close friend during the last thirteen years of his life, Hotchner writes a vivid account of the writer's decline. Mary Hemingway tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of the book.
• Meyers, Jeffrey . Hemingway: A Biography . New York, 1999. Includes two helpful appendices: one that lists all of Hemingway's injuries and illnesses and another listing travel dates and points of departure and arrival.
• Oliver, Charles M. Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work . New York, 1999. An invaluable encyclopedic guide.
• Smith, Paul . A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway . Boston, 1989.
• White, William , ed. Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–1924 . New York, 1985.

Related Articles

• Anderson, Sherwood
• Beattie, Ann
• H. D. (Doolittle, Hilda)
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott
• Lowell, Amy
• Oates, Joyce Carol
• Stein, Gertrude

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11 best ernest hemingway books in chronological order.

When puzzling over what the best Ernest Hemingway books are, a reader might not be burdened by a mountain of publications — as with trying to determine the best Stephen King novels , for instance. However, that doesn’t make the task any easier. And that’s because when someone connects with a Hemingway book, they really connect with it. For example, you will have a hard time convincing someone who holds The Old Man and the Sea above all else that For Whom the Bell Tolls is the best Ernest Hemingway book. 

That’s why we’ve decided not to pick favorites. Instead, this list covers 11 of our favorite Ernest Hemingway books in order of publication, not preference. Eight were published during his lifetime, and three posthumously. And to kick things off, let’s start with a fun fact: did you know that Hemingway’s fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, discovered about 332 unpublished work after Hemingway’s death? So much more potential Hemingway to read! And on that note...

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great classics out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized book recommendation  😉

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1. The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Often overlooked for his other works (and because it was published the same year as the much-praised The Sun Also Rises ), The Torrents of Spring is a novella that parodies Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter — a novel Hemingway viewed as pretentious. But the book doesn’t only focus on Anderson. It satirizes many American and British “great writers” of the day, including John Dos Passos and James Joyce.

Many view this novella as Hemingway’s attempt to break away from his roots, for various reasons: firstly, because Anderson played a key role in Hemingway’s early successes as an author; secondly, because many of Hemingway’s Chicago contemporaries subscribed to a distinct “Chicago School of Literature” style, which is mocked in The Torrents of Spring ; and finally, it is widely discussed that Hemingway published the parody in order to get out of his contract with his publisher at the time, Boni & Liveright.

“Take for yourself what you can, and don't be ruled by others; to belong to oneself - the whole savour of life lies in that.” 

Fun fact: The Torrents of Spring was written in just ten days.

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2. The Sun Also Rises (1926)

As an author whose works have been studied and referenced at length, Hemingway’s novels are often referred to in the same style of Friends episode titles (“The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break,” for instance). In the case of The Sun Also Rises , it’s “the quintessential novel of the ‘Lost Generation.’” In other words, it’s about the generation of people who suffered disillusionment and angst following the First World War. 

Over the course of the novel, unlucky Jake Barnes and extravagant Lady Brett Ashley travel from the jazzy Parisian parties of the Roaring 20s to the harsh and brutal bullfighting rings of Pamplona, Spain, with a ragtag crew of American expatriates. 

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Fun fact: While the book initially received mixed reviews for its modern and sparse approach to prose, many Hemingway scholars feel that The Sun Also Rises was his “most important work,” defining the writing style that would come to be known as the “iceberg theory” — writing that is simple on the surface, but contains deeper meanings between the lines.

3. A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Sticking with the aforementioned theme: this is the bestselling novel that not only turned the spotlight onto Hemingway as a modern American writer, but also the book that was dubbed “the premier American war novel” from WWI. Set against the backdrop of that very war, the novel is narrated from the first person perspective of expatriate Frederic Henry. Frederic serves as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army and embarks on a love affair with an English nurse called Catherine Barkley. 

The novel was heavily inspired by Hemingway’s own life: he also served in the Italian campaigns during WWI and fell in love with a nurse who cared for him in a hospital in Milan.

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.” 

Fun fact: Before A Farewell to Arms was published, Hemingway sent the manuscript to his good friend Scott F. Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald responded with ten pages of notes, to which Hemingway responded, “Kiss my ass.” Apparently this was par for the course in the teasing friendship between the two authors.

4. Winner Take Nothing (1933)

Think this bleak title masks the bright and cheery nature of the short stories within? Think again. Hemingway’s final short story collection takes readers on a somber journey, with many dark themes throughout — such as disillusionment, despair, dishonor, and death. While many of his novels feature sweeping heroic figures, the stories of Winner Take Nothing zero in on the darker parts of life.

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” 

Fun fact: This collection includes one of Hemingway’s best-known short stories, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” about an old, Spanish beggar.

5. To Have and Have Not (1937)

A bare-bones explanation of this novel brings to mind the plot of AMC’s Breaking Bad : a good man falls on hard times and turns to crime in order to support his family. However, there’s no meth-cooking or New Mexico backdrop in this tale. Instead, the novel takes place during the Great Depression — during which fishing boat captain Harry Morgan is forced to run contraband, and then illegal immigrants, between Cuba and Florida as a means of fighting the depravity and hunger of the time. 

“The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grit and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, inter-breeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban boilto houses, shacks whose only romance was their names.”

Fun fact: The book has been loosely adapted into five different films — most famously a 1944 version starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and then again in 1950, 1958, 1977, and 1987.

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Regarded as one of the best-written war novels of all time, Hemingway completed For Whom the Bell Tolls three years after covering the Spanish civil war for the North American Newspaper alliance. 

The story follows Robert Jordan, a young American working with republican guerrillas in the mountains of Spain. Their assignment is to blow up a major bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia, and the novel tracks the four days leading up to this event. Exploring themes of death, political ideology, and camaraderie, the novel inspired Maxwell Perkins (editor and discoverer of Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and more) to write of Hemingway: "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality, no one ever so completely performed it."

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life.”

Fun fact: The book’s title is taken from a poem by John Donne, who wrote meditations and prayers about health, pain, and sickness. The full poem is quoted in the epigraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls : "No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

7. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)

Do you ever read negative reviews of a book and then decide to read it anyway, to see whether you agree with the criticism or feel it was unjust? If you do, check out Across the River and Into the Trees , the final full-length novel published by Hemingway. It was the first of his novels to be met with unenthusiastic reception and negative press. (Despite this, it spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list — and was the only one of Hemingway’s books to reach the #1 spot).

The book centers on Richard Cantwell, a middle-aged, war-ravaged American colonel. He is stationed in Italy at the end of the Second World War, and about to embark on a duck-hunting trip in Trieste. Through flashbacks, readers get to know Richard — particularly, about a young Venetian countess he fell in love with and his experiences during the First World War. The novel is a love letter to Italy, a love letter to love, and an examination of the different ways in which people meet death. 

“He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.” 

Fun fact: The title, Across the River and Into the Trees, comes from the final documented words of U.S. Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

8. The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

The final novella published during Hemingway’s life, The Old Man and the Sea is also one of his most popular books — compared by critics of the time to Moby-Dick . The novella won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and was a large factor in Hemingway being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. 

The Old Man and the Sea examines themes of courage in the face of hardship and perseverance in the face of apparent defeat through Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who is down on his luck. He also happens to be in the middle of his life’s greatest struggle — a high-stakes battle with a relentless marlin out the Gulf Stream. (You can understand the Moby-Dick comparison). 

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” 

Fun fact: The book was featured in a September 1952 edition of Life magazine — an edition which then sold over five million copies in just two days.

9. A Moveable Feast (1964)

If you want to learn more about Hemingway’s youth from the man himself, check out this posthumously published memoir . A Moveable Feast deals with the author’s years as a struggling journalist and writer in 1920s Paris. It’s comprised of various journal entries, personal accounts, and stories written by Hemingway — and features a remarkable cast of notable figures, including: Sylvia Beach, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and more. Finally, if you want to see Paris in the 1920s as Hemingway did, simply make a note of the apartments, bars, cafes, and hotels the memoir mentions, as many still stand proudly today.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” 

Fun fact: There is some controversy surrounding Mary Hemingway’s posthumous publication of A Moveable Feast . Some feel that she removed significant passages — including a lengthy apology — about his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Other scholars have stood up for Mary, asserting the memoir was published just how Hemingway had intended it.

10. Islands in the Stream (1970)

Islands in the Stream was meant to be published after Across the River and Into the Trees , with the hope that it would revive Hemingway’s reputation after the bad press of the latter book. However, despite the fact that book was basically finished, it wasn’t published until almost 20 years later — long after Hemingway had passed away.

The novel is comprised of three parts. The first act, “Bimini,” introduces the main character Thomas Hudson: a renowned painter living in the Bahamas. The second act, “Havana,” jumps to the end of the Second World War, and sees Thomas receiving news of his son’s death. In the third act, “At Sea,” Thomas tracks the survivors of a sunken German U-boat, bent on bringing them to justice. 

“He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.”

Fun fact: The original third act of Islands In the Stream was titled "The Sea in Being" — which was eventually published separately as The Old Man and the Sea .

11. The Dangerous Summer (1985)

Cited as Hemingway’s last book, The Dangerous Summer is a nonfiction title which was written in 1960 and published posthumously over 20 years later. It describes the rivalry that occurred during the “dangerous summer” of 1959 between two bullfighters: Luis Migual Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez (Hemingway’s brother-in-law, and a major inspiration for the bullfighting depicted in The Sun Also Rises ). 

'Contento Ernesto?' he asked. 'Muy contento.' 'So am I,' he said. 'You saw how he [the bull] was? You saw everything about him?' 'I think so,' I said. 'Let's eat at Fraga.' 'Good.' 'Be careful on the road.' 'See you in Fraga,' I said." 

Fun fact: Are lengthy introductions your thing? Then you’ll love the 33-page intro that author James Mitchener provided for the beginning of The Dangerous Summer .

Looking for more literary classics to read? Check out our list of the 15 best John Steinbeck books.

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 16, 2017

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The 10 best Ernest Hemingway books, according to Goodreads readers

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• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is the master of understated, spare prose.
• Below are Ernest Hemingway's 10 most popular books, according to Goodreads readers .
• Readers especially love " The Old Man and the Sea ," " The Sun Also Rises ," and " A Farewell to Arms ."

When you think of Ernest Hemingway — journalist, novelist, bullfighting aficionado — you probably think of the lean, understated prose that defines many American classics. 

The opening line of the book that helped him win the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, " The Old Man and the Sea ," reads as a status report: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." Nicknamed the "iceberg theory" by Hemingway, much of his novels' meatiness (their nuances, their themes) lies looming beneath the surface. (For a man who wrote that he gets over writer's block by sitting down and writing the truest sentence that you know," this isn't altogether surprising.)

If you're looking for where to start in the Hemingway canon, know that you can't really go wrong. After reading the manuscript for " For Whom The Bell Tolls ," the famed editor Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway to say, "if the function of a writer is to reveal reality, no one ever so completely performed it." And William Faulkner, often considered one of the best American writers of all time, wrote that "time may show ["The Old Man and the Sea"] to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries."

To make diving into Hemingway's work a little easier, we've compiled a ranking of the 10 most popular Hemingway books, according to Goodreads reviewers.

The 10 most popular Ernest Hemingway books, according to Goodreads:

Descriptions provided by Amazon and lightly edited for clarity.

'The Old Man and the Sea'

"The Old Man and the Sea," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $11.39

"The Old Man and the Sea" is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it's the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, and of personal triumph won from loss.

'The Sun Also Rises'

" The Sun Also Rises," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $14.72

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, this novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

'A Farewell to Arms'

"A Farewell to Arms," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $14.99

Written when Ernest Hemingway was 30 years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, "A Farewell to Arms" is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield — weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion — this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

"For Whom the Bell Tolls," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.47

Published in 1940, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise.

'A Moveable Feast'

"A Moveable Feast," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $13

Published posthumously in 1964, Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the 1920s, "A Moveable Feast," remains one of his most enduring works. This restored edition includes the original manuscript, never-before-published Paris sketches, and irreverent portraits of literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford.

'The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories'

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $14.72

Selected from "Winner Take Nothing," "Men Without Women," and "The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories," this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway's career, to his father's suicide; "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a "brilliant fusion of personal observation, hearsay and invention," wrote Hemingway's biographer, Carlos Baker; and the title story itself, of which Hemingway said: "I put all the true stuff in," with enough material, he boasted, to fill four novels. 

Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America's master storytellers at the top of his form.

'The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway'

"The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $17.90

The complete, authoritative collection of Ernest Hemingway's short fiction, including classic stories like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," along with seven previously unpublished stories.

'To Have and Have Not'

"To Have and Have Not," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $15.64

"To Have and Have Not" is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre.

'In Our Time'

"In Our Time," available on Amazon and Bookshop , from $7.99

"In Our Time" is Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord". The collection's publication history was complex. 

The stories' themes – of alienation, loss, grief, separation – continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting, and current events.

'Islands in the Stream'

"Islands in the Stream," available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $15.79

First published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway's death, this is the story of an artist and adventurer, a man much like Hemingway himself. Beginning in the 1930s, "Islands in the Stream" follows the fortunes of Thomas Hudson, from his experiences as a painter on the Gulf Stream island of Bimini through his antisubmarine activities off the coast of Cuba during World War II.

'Men Without Women'

" Men Without Women," available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $14.72

First published in 1927, "Men Without Women" represents some of Hemingway's most important and compelling early writing. In these 14 stories, Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: The casualties of war, the often-uneasy relationship between men and women, sport and sportsmanship. 

• Main content

Biography Online

Ernest Hemingway Biography

Hemingway lived through the major conflicts of Europe during the first half of the Twentieth-Century. His war experiences led to powerful accounts, which described the horrors of modern war. Two major books include; A Farewell to Arms (1929) – about the First World War, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) – about the Spanish Civil War. Many of his books are considered classics of American literature.

Hemingway was born in 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving school, he worked as a journalist for the Kansas City City Star. He later writing was influenced by the style guide of the paper. “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

Hemingway, 1918

However, after a few months of work, in 1918 he enlisted with the Red Cross to volunteer as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He was sent to the Italian front where he saw the horrors of the trench war. In July 1918, he was seriously wounded from mortar fire, but, despite his injuries and coming under machine-gun fire – still managed to carry two Italian comrades to safety. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for this act of bravery.

Whilst recuperating from his injuries he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, but she rejected his offer of marriage. This rejection left a powerful emotional scar. A decade later, in 1929 Hemingway would write a semi-autobiographical novel, – A Farwell to Arms based on his war experiences . The main character in the book is an ambulance driver who becomes disillusioned with the war and then elopes with a Spanish girl to Switzerland.

Hemingway returned home to the US, but fell out with his mother. Hemingway disliked the moralising tone of his outwardly religious mother, who accused Hemingway of living based on ‘lazy loafing and pleasure seeking,’ Hemingway’s free spirit rebelled against his mother’s more religious, moralistic approach and he walked away from his family and was never reconciled.

In 1921 he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives, he moved to Chicago and then Paris, where he spent much of the inter-war years. He worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star and became acquainted with many modernist writers, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound who lived in Paris at the time. In 1926, he published a successful novel “The Sun Also Rises,” which was based on a generation of American socialites who drifted around Europe. For his part, Hemingway enjoyed the atmosphere and intellectual curiosity of Paris in the ‘roaring twenties.’

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

In 1932, he wrote a non-fiction book “The Dance of Death” which was a sympathetic look at the Spanish custom of bullfighting. Hemingway pondered the question of whether it was justified to torment and kill an animal for sport. Hemingway was fascinated by the heroic, yet barbaric act which appealed to the Latin machismo and to Hemingway was not a sport but art and “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway in Spain

In 1937, he went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil war. He advocated international support for the Popular Front – who were fighting the fascist regime led by Franco. He later wrote a book – For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which captures the struggles and brutality of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War, he continued to work as a foreign correspondent. He was present at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

Literary recognition

After the Second World War, Hemingway bought a home in Finca Vigia (“Lookout Farm”), in Cuba. Here in Cuba, he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) – story about an elderly fisherman and devout Catholic, Spencer Tracy. The novel was praised by critics and he awarded the Pulitzer Prize. (1953)

In 1954, Hemingway was involved in two plane crashes which left him severely injured and in pain for the rest of his life.  After the crash, Hemingway was bed-ridden for a couple of years. Towards the end of the year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954). His citation for the Nobel Prize was

“his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

For many years, Hemingway had sought the Nobel Prize, but when he was notified of the award, he humbly suggested other writers may have deserved it more. He was concerned that news of his near-death, may have affected the sympathies of the jury

Then in 1960, Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba forced him to return to the US – he returned to Ketchum, Idaho. The last years were very difficult for Hemingway, he suffered from great physical pain, his mental clarity diminished, he struggled to write and he suffered from increasing depression. He tried electric shock therapy but to no avail. In 1961, at the age of 62, he killed himself with a shotgun.

Writing style of Hemingway

Hemingway’s style had some similarities to other modernist writers. It was a reaction against the more elaborate, turgid style of the nineteenth century. Hemingway’s writing was direct and minimalist – often leaving things unstated, but at the same time profoundly moving for bringing the reader into the heart of the story and experience.

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

– Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway termed his style the Iceberg theory.

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway said the facts float above the water, but the structure is kept out of sight. Behind the minimalist prose is a great effort, but the result is simplicity, immediacy and clarity.

He was married four times.

“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”

– Ernest Hemingway – Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

Religious views of Hemingway

Hemingway was born and raised in a strict Protestant tradition. After he married his second wife, he converted to Catholicism. Although he was not always observant in attending mass, he was fascinated by Catholic rites, and would frequently visit churches on his own and light a candle. In his writings, he was also interested in the idea of pilgrimage, to Catholic sites.

After his serious injury in July 1918, he was baptized by an Italian priest and given the last rites. Hemingway also describes a spiritual experience during his serious injury. He says he felt that his

“soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.” ( link )

Selected list of works by Hemingway

• Indian Camp (1926)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1935)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
• A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous)
• True at First Light (1999)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan .  “Ernest Hemingway Biography ”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net. Last updated 13 March 2020. Published 11th Feb 2013.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway at Amazon

Ernest Hemingway – A Biography

Ernest Hemingway  – A biography by Mary Dearborn at Amazon

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• World Biography

Ernest Hemingway Biography

Born: July 21, 1898 Oak Park, Illinois Died: July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho American author

Ernest Hemingway, American Nobel Prize-winning author, was one of the most celebrated and influential literary stylists of the twentieth century. His critical reputation rests solidly upon a small body of exceptional writing, set apart by its style, emotional content, and dramatic intensity of vision.

Childhood in the Midwest

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1898. His father was a country physician who taught his son hunting and fishing; his mother was a religious woman, active in church affairs, who led her son to play the cello and sing in the choir. Hemingway's early years were spent largely in fighting the feminine influence of his mother while feeding off the influence of his father. He spent the summers with his family in the woods of northern Michigan, where he often accompanied his father on professional calls. The discovery of his father's apparent lack of courage, later depicted in the short story "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," and his suicide several years later left the boy with an emotional scar.

Despite the intense pleasure Hemingway took from outdoor life and his popularity in high school—where he distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete—he ran away from home twice. However, his first real chance for escape came in 1917, when the United States entered World War I (1914–18; a war in which forces clashed for European control). Eager to serve his country in the war, he volunteered for active service in the infantry (foot soldiers) but was rejected because of eye trouble.

Hemingway then enlisted in the Red Cross medical service, driving an ambulance on the Italian front. He was badly wounded in the knee yet carried a wounded man on his back a considerable distance to the aid station. After having over two hundred shell fragments (parts of bullets) removed from his legs and body, Hemingway next enlisted in the Italian infantry, served on the Austrian front until the armistice (truce), and was decorated for bravery by the Italian government. Hemingway soon returned home where he was hailed as a hero.

Learning his trade

In 1923 Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. The poems are insignificant, but the stories give strong indication of his emerging genius. With In Our Time (1925) Hemingway drew on his experiences while summering in Michigan to depict the initiation into the world of pain and violence of young Nick Adams, a model for later Hemingway heroes.

Major novels

Hemingway returned to the United States in 1926 with the manuscripts of two novels and several short stories. That May, Scribner's issued Hemingway's second novel, The Sun Also Rises. This novel, the major statement of the "lost generation," describes a group of Americans and Englishmen, all of whom have suffered physically and emotionally during the war.

In December 1929 A Farewell to Arms was published. This novel tells the story of a tragic love affair between an American soldier and an English nurse set against the backdrop of war and collapsing world order. It contains a philosophical expression of the Hemingway code that man is basically helpless in a violent age: "The world breaks everyone," reflects the main character, "and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

Hemingway revealed his passionate interest in bull-fighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a humorous and unique nonfiction study. Hemingway's African safari in 1934 provided the material for another nonfiction work, The Green Hills of Africa (1935), as well as two of his finest short stories, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

In 1940 Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, his most ambitious novel. A wonderfully clear narrative, it is written in less lyrical and more dramatic prose (nonpoetry writing) than his earlier work.

World War II

Following the critical and popular success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway lapsed into a literary silence that lasted a full decade and was largely the result of his strenuous, frequently reckless, activities during World War II (1939–45; a war in which France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan). In 1942, as a Collier's correspondent with the Third Army, he witnessed some of the bloodiest battles in Europe. At this time he received the nickname of "Papa" from his admirers, both military and literary.

In 1944 while in London, Hemingway met and soon married Mary Welsh, a Time reporter. His three previous marriages—to Hadley Richardson, mother of one son; to Pauline Pfeiffer, mother of his second and third sons; and to Martha Gelhorn—had all ended in divorce. Following the war, Hemingway and his wife purchased a home, Finca Vigía, near Havana, Cuba.

In 1952 The Old Man and the Sea was published. A novella (short novel) about an extraordinary battle between a tired old Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. A year later, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hemingway's declining physical condition and increasingly severe mental problems drastically reduced his literary output in the last years of his life. A journey to Africa planned by the author and his wife in 1954 ended in their plane crash over the Belgian Congo. Hemingway suffered severe burns and internal injuries from which he never fully recovered. Additional strain occurred when the revolutionary Cuban government of Fidel Castro (1926–) forced the Hemingways to leave Finca Vigía.

After only a few months in their new home in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for hypertension (high blood pressure) and depression, and was later treated with electroshock therapy, a radical therapy where an electric current is sent through the body. Made bitter by an illness that humiliated him physically and impaired his writing, he killed himself with a shotgun on July 2, 1961.

Many of Hemingway's unpublished and unfinished works were published after his death. Because of his amazing body of work, and his intense approach to life, Hemingway was arguably one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century.

For More Information

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, 1969.

Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir. New York: Random House, 1966.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Plath, James. Remembering Ernest Hemingway. Key West, FL: Ketch & Yawl Press, 1999.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Blackwell, 1989.

Voss, Frederick. Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time. Washington, DC: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

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Books by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist and journalist who authored fifteen books.

He moved to Paris in the 1920s. “The only way they could have an interesting life is by being poor in Paris, rather than poor in the US.” Yale English professor Wai Chee Dimock on the best books on Hemingway in Paris . “There were all these different writers in Paris, like [James] Joyce and [Ezra] Pound, so they were aware of what other people were doing. That was a tremendous spur, especially to Hemingway. There was also experimentation in the visual arts.”

“Hemingway basically changed the nature of the American story; although his macho side has caused him to fall out of vogue, I think his novels will actually prove to last a long, long time – even though he may have created stereotypes that people treat with some scorn.” Scott Turow on the best legal novels.

“Hemingway obviously thought war was a great thing. Outside war, he liked hunting, fishing and shooting. Killing things was his thing and a war was a natural environment for him. That’s not to say that he thinks that war is an unmitigated good. For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms show the human cost of war as well, and the political cost of war, and the futility of it.” Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford Kate McLoughlin on the best war writing .

Hemingway won a Pulitzer in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year.

As a great of 20th-century American literature , Hemingway has been recommended many times on Five Books.

A Farewell To Arms

By ernest hemingway.

Read expert recommendations

“For most of the book I thought I liked it less than For Whom the Bell Tolls. I didn’t think it would place in my pantheon of novels-that-I-love. Then I read the ending. I’m not going to tell you much, but let me just say that the ending is one of the most spectacular pieces of writing. It’s mind-blowing. So, so good. And the writing is just… virtuosic. It’s like listening to Mozart. Incredible.” Read more...

The Best First World War Novels

Alice Winn , Novelist

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms show the human cost of war as well, and the political cost of war, and the futility of it.

The Best War Writing recommended by Kate McLoughlin

The Sun Also Rises

“Many people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories. It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona…It can be summed up by the phrase ‘grace under pressure’, and looks at the code of ethics that emerges from bullfighting. It starts in Paris and then goes to Spain. The main event is a bullfight in Pamplona. The main characters are a group of expatriates, including a Jewish man, Robert Cohn, who was a boxing champion at Princeton. The narrator, Jake Barnes, was injured in World War One and his impotence is strongly suggested.” Read more...

The best books on Hemingway in Paris

Wai Chee Dimock , Literary Scholar

A Moveable Feast

“We think of Hemingway as an American writer, but much of his writing is set outside of the United States, just as much of his life was set outside of the United States… A Moveable Feast takes place in Paris. It’s Hemingway’s memoir of the time he spent there with his first wife and it was stitched together by his last wife. It gives you the sense that he yearns for his first wife and the time when they were young together in France. Very often transnational literature is concerned with abrogating an implicit border of belonging. And very often it concerns the question: Does one have the right to be where one is or where one wishes to be? But in A Moveable Feast one never gets the sense that Hemingway questions whether he can or should be in Paris. There seem to be no visa issues or racial questions. Perhaps there is a sense of entitlement to the expatriate experience that the rest of transnational literature lacks. At the same time, it’s a book about a border that cannot be crossed—the border between past and present. Hemingway is reaching back into his past. It turns out even our most manly of writers can be wistful.” Read more...

The Best Transnational Literature

Mohsin Hamid , Novelist

The Old Man and the Sea

“I taught this book to my students during the economic sanctions. And I feel like it gave me some kind of strength to continue. When I read about the struggle of the old man and the blood running from his hands because of the heat of the rope, I would always think, one day we will make it. At that time I had to work three jobs just to make ends meet. I thought I will struggle on and in the end things will come out fine, but they didn’t. We were invaded and our lives were shattered and people changed.” Read more...

The best books on Life in Iraq During the Invasion

May Witwit , Literary Scholar

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

When I read Ernest Hemingway’s [short story] “Big Two-Hearted River”, I felt I was learning not only about Nick Adams’s interior but also about fly fishing.

Jim Shepard on the best Short Stories

Hemingway Boxed Set

A great place to start if you're new to Hemingway or try Hemingway's short stories .

Interviews where books by Ernest Hemingway were recommended

The best books on life in iraq during the invasion , recommended by may witwit, my year in iraq by l paul bremer iii with malcolm mcconnell, the assassination attempts against president saddam hussein by barzan al-tikriti, cultural cleansing in iraq by raymond w baker, shereen t ismael, tareq y ismael, the old man and the sea by ernest hemingway, a tale of two cities by charles dickens.

Iraqi academic May Witwit tells of the horrors of US-occupied Iraq: “We were being shot at, and for three days a body lay at my front gate and nobody dared to move him”

The Best Transnational Literature , recommended by Mohsin Hamid

No longer at ease by chinua achebe, a moveable feast by ernest hemingway, meatless days: a memoir by sara suleri, the buddha in the attic by julie otsuka, fictions by jorge luis borges.

Beleaguered ‘citizens of nowhere’ will be pleased to know they have their own literary genre. For anyone who has ever wondered where they belong, or why, when you leave your home country, it’s never the same when you return, here are the best five books to read—including some by the greatest authors of the 20th century.

The best books on Hemingway in Paris , recommended by Wai Chee Dimock

The sun also rises by ernest hemingway, the autobiography of alice b toklas by gertrude stein, the book of salt by monique truong, the paris wife by paula mclain.

Paris in the 1920s was a creative melting pot, the haunt of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. The Yale English professor gives us a feel for what it was like to be there

The best books on Love, War, and Longing , recommended by Janine di Giovanni

The radetzky march by joseph roth, the last time i saw paris by elliot paul, travels with myself and another by martha gellhorn, the odyssey by homer and translated by emily wilson.

War reporter tells us that her life is permeated with sense of loss and longing. She quotes her heroine Martha Gellhorn: “I have a sudden notion of why history is such a mess. Human beings do not live long enough”

The Best First World War Novels , recommended by Alice Winn

Regeneration by pat barker, a farewell to arms by ernest hemingway, birdsong by sebastian faulks, all quiet on the western front by erich maria remarque, at night all blood is black by david diop, translated by anna moschovakis.

There are dozens of novels about the First World War, many of them well worth your time. Here, Alice Winn—author of In Memoriam , a bestselling story of forbidden love between two young soldiers—selects five of the very best, including autobiographical fiction by former officers and historical novels that bring humanity to the horror of the Great War.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway | Biography, Facts, Famous Works & Quotes

Ernest Hemingway was an American author who is widely regarded as one of the finest writers of the 20th century . Born in an affluent family, he had fraught relations with his parents. After attending Oak Park and River Forest High School , Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star newspaper beginning his career as a journalist and writer. In 1923 , his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems , was published. Then his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises established him as a major writer of his generation. The most famous work of Ernest Hemingway is Old Man and the Sea , which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and played a key role his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature . Ernest Hemingway married four times in his life and had three children . In later life, he had an issue with depression which led to his suicide in 1961 . Know all about the Ernest Hemingway through his biography, interesting facts about him, his most famous works and his best quotes.

Formative Years and Family

Ernest Hemingway was named after his maternal grandfather Ernest Miller Hall and was the second born child among five other siblings. At an early age Ernest was forced into playing the Cello on his mother’s insistence, something which he would later admit helped him in his writings . Among his most cherished childhood memories would be the family’s summer trips to Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan . It is here that the young Hemingway learned how to hunt, fish and camp in the woods from his father; early experiences that instilled in him a life-long passion for outdoor adventure and travelling.

Later revelations from his sister Marcelline and other sources gave more insight into the Hemingway family and Ernest’s fraught relations with his parents . Marcelline was 18 months older than Ernest but since their mother Grace Hemingway had always wanted twins, she decided to dress up Ernest in little girl clothes to match Marcelline and began to treat them as twin girls . Though dressing up infants alike was not unusual in those times, Grace took her fancies to the extreme. The obsession lasted for some time and Marcelline was even made to drop a year so that both the children could go to the same grade.

Ernest’s third wife Martha Gellhorn would later attribute Ernest’s difficulties with women to his relationship with his mother. She stated: “Deep in Ernest, due to his mother, going back to the indestructible first memories of childhood, was mistrust and fear of women.” Ernest also struggled to connect with his father Clarence, who was a strict disciplinarian and would often beat him with a razor strop. These early impressions would have a lasting impact on Hemingway .

Early writing career and joining the Red Cross

In 1913, Ernest Hemingway joined the Oak Park and River Forest High School as a freshman. He had little interest in the English language at the time and aspired to be a doctor . Good grades in the language along with the inspiration and guidance from teachers would however help him develop a passion for writing in the coming years. At school he would prove himself as a decent athlete in track and field events and played varied sports like boxing, water polo and football . He also performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline. During his last two years, Ernest Hemingway regularly contributed and edited the school’s literary magazine and newspaper (Trapeze and Tabula) , mostly writing about sports.

In his senior year, Ernest began thinking about college but the plans soon dissipated as he became more interested in joining a newspaper. In April 1917 as he prepared for his high school graduation, the United States declared war and joined the Allied powers (Britain, France and Italy) in the First World War . In October the same year Ernest moved to the city of Kansas, and with some assistance from his uncle Tyler joined as a cub reporter in the Kansas City Star . Though this job stint lasted only a few months it would play a pivotal role in the writer’s career . The Star’s style guide which advocated short precise sentences and paragraphs, use of vigorous English and positive writing would lay the foundations of Ernest’s own writing style which would further inspire a generation of writers .

The First World War Experience

During his time with the Kansas City Star, Hemingway was also pursuing his effort to join the Great War and serve his country. In December 1917, after being rejected by the U.S. Army for poor eyesight , Hemingway got an opportunity with the Red Cross , who were actively recruiting to aid the efforts on the Italian Front. Hemingway soon joined the organization as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front, finally setting sail for Italy in May 1918 from New York. A month later in Milan, Italy, his first assignment would be a rescue operation to retrieve the shredded remains of female workers at a site of explosion; an incident he would later describe in his 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon . Ernest would be later posted at the Red Cross base camp in Fossalta , a town in Venice . Here on July 8, he was seriously wounded by shrapnel from enemy mortar fire, while he was bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. Despite his wounds Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety , and was awarded for this brave action with the Italian War Merit Cross , the Croce al Merito di Guerra.

Hemingway spent the next six months in the Red Cross Hospital in Milan, recovering from his wounds. It was also the time he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky , a Red Cross nurse who was seven years his senior. Returning to America in January 1919, Hemingway hoped that Agnes would join him in some time and the couple would wed, but instead he would only receive the news of her engagement in March . The affair with Agnes left Hemingway emotionally scarred, she would later inspire the character of Catherine Barkley in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms .

Life in Paris

Post war, Hemingway started working for the Toronto Star as a freelancer and staff writer . He moved to Chicago in December 1920 and also began working as an associate editor for the Cooperative Commonwealth . At this time he became acquainted with Elizabeth Hadley Richards through common friends and began his courtship with her. Hadley like Agnes was seven years elder to Hemingway, and though there were obvious similarities she had a childishness about her which Agnes lacked. The couple were married on September 3, 1921. A few months after his marriage Hemingway was hired as the foreign correspondent for Toronto Star to cover the Greko-Turkish war , and moved to Paris along with his newly wedded wife.

In Paris, Hemingway became acquainted with the American expatriate writer, art collector and modernist Gertrude Stein . Her Paris salon was the melting pot of modernist art, literature and culture , where Hemingway would meet up with personalities like Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Joan Miro, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse . Stein and Anderson assisted and influenced Hemingway during his early years in Paris, while he shared a special bond with Ezra Pound who would further introduce him to the Irish writer James Joyce.

In 1923 , Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems , was published. The same year in October, Hadley Richardson gave birth to his first son Jack Hemingway . The child was nicknamed Bumby and Stein was chosen to be his godmother. During this time, while on his visit to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, Hemingway developed his lifelong passion for bull fighting . In 1925, his first well known work In Our Time was published while his developing friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspired Hemingway to start working on his own novel .

1926 marked a pivotal shift in the life and career of Hemingway. It was a time when Hemingway had grown weary of his Paris friends and attacked them in his lesser known parody novel The Torrent of Spring . The controversial book led him to his new publisher and drifted him away from his familiar social circle. Later in the year the publication of The Sun Also Rises became the first step in establishing him as a noteworthy writer of his generation . During the work and publication of the novel, Hemingway also started an affair with an American journalist Pauline Pfeiffer . The relationship led to Hemingway’s second marriage in May 1927 to Pauline and his conversion to Catholicism . This was after he formally separated from his first wife Hadley. Later in 1927, a collection of Hemingway’s short stories Men without Women was released which included his famous boxing story Fifty Grand . In early 1928, Ernest and Pauline had decided to leave Paris for good . They soon travelled to Kansas City , where their first son (Hemingway’s second) Patrick was born on June 28, 1928.

Key West and the Spanish Civil War

After his departure from Paris, Hemingway never lived in a big city and moved to the island of Key West in Florida, USA. In 1929, he went on to produce one of his most famous works A Farewell To Arms . Set in the backdrop of the First World War, the novel was centered around the love affair between an American expatriate Frederic Henry and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley . The book was a bestseller and established Hemingway as a modern American writer of considerable stature . The early 1930s saw the birth of Hemingway’s third son Gregory with Pauline, publication of his bullfighting treatise Death in the Afternoon and his travels to Africa; which would provide material for stories like Green Hills of Africa and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

In 1937, Hemingway took up the assignment for the North American Newspaper Alliance and left for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War . He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco , and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938) . During this time he also developed a romantic relationship with travel writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn , a relationship which would culminate in his third marriage and second divorce in 1940 . The Spanish War also provided Hemingway material for his next major novel For Whom the Bell Tolls which was released in 1940 . The book would go on to sell more than half a million copies and earn him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

Move to Cuba and the Second World War

Post the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway went on to purchase the Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”) in Havana Cuba and further covered the Japanese invasion of China . In 1944 , during the last years of the Second World War , he was sent to London as a journalist, where he met Time magazine correspondent Mary Welsh and was immediately attracted towards her. Ernest and Martha would end their deteriorating marriage in 1945 , paving way for Hemingway’s fourth marriage with Mary Welsh in 1946.

During World War 2, Hemingway accompanied the troops as a war correspondent in the Normandy Landings of June 1944 . In July he attached himself to the 22nd Infantry Regiment marching towards Paris and witnessed the liberation of Paris in August 1944 . Later that year, he observed heavy fighting in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and had himself driven to Luxembourg in spite of illness to cover The Battle of the Bulge , where he needed to be hospitalized due to pneumonia . He would later be recognized with the Bronze Star for his bravery in 1947, for having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions” .

Nobel Prize

The period following WW2 saw Hemingway becoming prone to accidents and falling into depression after the death of several of his close friends. In 1948, on a trip to Venice with Mary, he become infatuated with the 19 year old Adriana Ivancich , which inspired his 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees . The negative reviews of the book would prompt Hemingway to draft the Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, and claim “the best I can write ever for all of my life” . The book was well received and would make him an international celebrity , while finally winning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954 .

Final Years

In 1954, while travelling to Africa, Hemingway was seriously wounded in two successive plane crashes . In the following years of his life in Cuba he would be mostly bedridden facing several ailments including blood pressure, liver disease and arteriosclerosis . In 1959, Hemingway completed A Moveable Feast , a memoir of his days in Paris; and visited Spain to write a series of articles on bullfighting for the Life Magazine . By now he was having issues in organizing his writing and was suffering from falling eyesight .

In the following year, Hemingway and Mary were forced to leave Cuba when it’s new leader Fidel Castro seemed intent on nationalizing property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals . They moved to a house in Ketchum, Idaho. In early 1960s, Hemingway’s mental condition was also further deteriorating. He had bouts of anxiety and depression , and was often treated with electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. In April 1961, he was hospitalized once again due to his mental condition, however this time on his return to Idaho, Hemingway decided to end his own life on 2nd of July 1961.

Main Sources

Oliver, Charles M. (1999). “Ernest Hemingway A to Z”. P139-140. Facts on File. Reynolds, Michael (2000). “Literary Masters Vol 2 – Ernest Hemingway”. Gale Group Detroit. Kert, Bernice (1983). “The Hemingway Women”. P83-90. W.W. Norton and Company. Mellow, James R. (1992). “Hemingway – A life without Consequences”. P67, 69-85, 316-318 Addison Wesley Publishing Company. Walsh, John (Oct 23, 2011). “Being Ernest: John Walsh unravels the mystery behind Hemingway’s suicide” . Independent. Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway (1962). “At the Hemingways: a family portrait.” Boyle, Louise. 19 Dec, 2011. “Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter returns to author’s Cuban home to mark 50th anniversary of his suicide” . Dailymail.co.uk. “Star style and rules for writing” . KansasCity.com.

INTERESTING FACTS

Read in detail.

#1 His mother liked to dress him as a girl.

#2 He was the de facto bodyguard for James Joyce.

#3 Hemingway wrote a satirical novel targeting his own friends.

#4 He may have deliberately manoeuvred his way out of a contract.

#5 He made a plan to battle German U-Boats during WW2.

#6 He was formally booked for the contravention of the Geneva Convention.

#7 Hemingway worked for both the Soviet and US Intelligence.

#8 He wanted to ‘liberate’ the Ritz Hotel from the Germans.

#9 Hemingway’s scripts were retrieved from Cuba with the help of the US government.

#10 Hemingway gave himself the nickname “Papa”.

MOST FAMOUS WORKS

Famous quotations.

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Hemingway on Hunting

“In order to write about life first you must live it.” Hemingway on Writing

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Hemingway on Happiness

“Courage is grace under pressure.” Hemingway on Courage

“The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.” Hemingway on Trust

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” Hemingway on Books

“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.” Across the River and into the Trees

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” A Farewell to Arms

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” The Old Man and the Sea

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” The Sun Also Rises

MORE ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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The Best Hemingway Novels

In her new biography, Influencing Hemingway: The People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work , Nancy W. Sindelar introduces the reader to the individuals who played significant roles in Hemingway’s development as both a man and as an artist. Sindelar ranks the fiction works of Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway created memorable characters in his short stories and novels by drawing on real people—parents, friends, and fellow writers, among others. He also drew on real places and events to create settings and engaging plots. Whether revisiting the Italian front in A Farewell to Arms , recounting a Pamplona bull run in The Sun Also Rises , or depicting a Cuban fishing village in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway relied on his personal experiences, friendships and observations for the content of his work.

Since Hemingway’s works reflect interests and adventures at different stages of his life, creating a ranking for his fiction is difficult. However, the following ranks his most broadly acclaimed works and comments on their contribution to the Hemingway legacy.

1. The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway’s first novel is at the top of my list because it reflects his reliance on his traditional Midwestern values as he encountered new experiences and values in post-World War I Europe. Using friends and acquaintances that populated the cafes along Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris, he reveals his concern about the valueless life of these Lost Generation characters and begins his personal and literary search for meaning in what appears to be a godless world. In the midst of their heavy drinking and meaningless revelry during a fiesta in Spain, Pedro Romero, the matador, becomes a hero. He conducts himself with honor and courage, and it is here we see the beginnings of what will become the Hemingway Code.

The book also tops my list because it reveals Hemingway’s courageous attempt to write in a new and different way by portraying the bad and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Though The Sun Also Rises was well received by the critics, it was not well received by Hemingway’s acquaintances who saw themselves portrayed as self-indulgent, alcoholic and sexually promiscuous in his unflattering, but honest, characterizations. Nor was it well received by his mother, who said he had produced “one of the filthiest books of the year.”

2. A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway’s second novel is a high on my list because it is the fictional account of events that changed and informed his world view. When Hemingway left the security of the Midwest and went to Italy looking for adventure as an ambulance driver in World War I, he got more than he had bargained for. The idealistic Midwesterner joined the war to end all wars, ready to display honor and courage, but was blown up in a trench. Then he fell in love, contemplated marriage and was rejected by the woman he loved. His confrontation with death, his subsequent wound, and his first experience with love all became catalysts for developing a code of behavior for facing life’s challenges.

A Farewell to Arms was the fictional result of Hemingway’s experiences in Italy and initiates what would become one of the most dominant themes in his novels, the confrontation of death. Though Catherine Barkley’s character seems dated to contemporary female readers, the book still demonstrates that Hemingway used what he learned in Italy to show that war brings out the best and worst in men and women.

3. The Old Man and the Sea - After the unsuccessful reception to Across the River and into the Trees , Hemingway wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning novel to defend his reputation as a writer. Based on his experiences in Cuba, he created a character of an old fisherman. Alone in a skiff, the old man catches a great marlin, only to have it destroyed by sharks. The old man, who had been a champion arm-wrestler and a successful fisherman, was, like Hemingway, trying for a comeback.

The old man embraces the code for living that Hemingway first developed based on his experiences in World War I---the experiences in which a man confronts an unconquerable element. In fighting the sharks, the old man exhibits courage and grace under pressure, believing “a man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”

The reviews and success of the book were nothing less than phenomenal. Appropriately, Hemingway was aboard his boat and out on the Gulf Stream when he heard via the ship’s radio that the book had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

4. To Have and Have Not - Hemingway’s growing awareness of financial and social strata are reflected in To Have and Have Not . The characters are based on people the now famous author met in Key West—the working class he encountered on the docks and at Sloppy Joe’s, the rich who moored their boats in Key West harbor, and the illegal Chinese immigrants who were being smuggled from Cuba to Key West to promote tourism in newly formed Chinatowns.

In this Depression-era novel Hemingway comes close to arguing for social and political changes needed to help the working man. However, Hemingway does not see the New Deal remedies as the solution. As a result, the fate of the novel’s main character, Harry Morgan, outlines the limits of personal freedom, self-reliance and the absence of grace under pressure, and the closest Hemingway comes to a solution is for Harry to say, “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no f------ chance."

5. The Nick Adams Stories - This collection of short stories is a favorite because it provides insight into the life of the young Hemingway. As a child Ernest would accompany his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, as he provided pro bono medical services and attended to injured Indians, women in child-birth, and individuals in a variety of life-threatening situations in the Indian camps of northern Michigan. The memory of one of these trips appears in “Indian Camp.” Young Nick is with his father on a medical mission to deliver a baby. A Native American woman’s been in labor for two days, and Nick observes his father perform a Caesarian with a jackknife sterilized in a basin of boiled water.

Similarly, the reader gains insight into the relationship of Hemingway’s parents in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and understands Hemingway’s feelings of separation from his family and life in Oak Park after returning from World War I in “A Soldier’s Home.”

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Based on his experiences as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, this novel contains the classic Hemingway elements---a main character demonstrating grace under pressure and a plot that combines the interest and conflicts associated with love and war. As with his other works, Hemingway uses his friendships and personal experiences. Robert Jordan is modeled after Robert Merriman, an American professor who left his research on collective farming in Russia to become a commander in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was killed during the final assault on Belchite. Maria is based on a young nurse of the same name who was gang raped by Nationalist soldiers early in the war. The novel’s three days of conflict takes place near the El Tajo gorge that cuts through the Andalusian town of Rondo, where a political massacre like the one led by Pablo occurred early in the Spanish Civil War.

Though some readers find the details of the battles tedious, it is one of Hemingway’s most popular novels. The book was published in October, 1940. By April, 1941 almost 500,000 copies had been sold, and in January, 1942, the movie rights were purchased by Paramount for $100,000.

Photo courtesy of the Estate of Yousuf Karsh

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