ernest hemingway brief biography

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
• Never confuse movement with action.
• There is no friend as loyal as a book.
• Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. It will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
• An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
• The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
• Write drunk, edit sober.
• 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.
• All thinking men are atheists.
• It's good to have an end to journey to; but in the end it's the journey that matters.
• Never that think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

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Biography of Ernest Hemingway, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winning Writer

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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

• Literature Notes
• Ernest Hemingway Biography
• About Hemingway's Short Stories
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Indian Camp
• The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
• The End of Something
• The Three-Day Blow
• The Killers
• A Way You'll Never Be
• In Another Country
• Big Two-Hearted River: Part I
• Big Two-Hearted River: Part II
• The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
• Hills Like White Elephants
• A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro
• Character Analysis
• Francis Macomber
• Margot Macomber
• Critical Essay
• Hemingway's Writing Style
• Full Glossary for Hemingway's Short Stories
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Ernest Hemingway's colorful life as a war correspondent, big game hunter, angler, writer, and world celebrity, as well as winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, began in quiet Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. When Ernest, the first son and second child born to Dr. Ed and Grace Hemingway, was only seven weeks old, his general practitioner father took the family for a quick weekend trip to the Michigan north woods, where Dr. Hemingway was having land cleared by several Ottawa Indians for Windemere, a summer cabin that he built on Walloon Lake. Ernest would return to this area year after year, as a child and later as an adolescent — hunting, fishing, camping, vegetable gardening, adventuring, and making plans for each new, successive summer.

Ernest's mother, a devout, religious woman with considerable musical talent, hoped that her son would develop an interest in music; she herself had once hoped for an operatic career, but during her first recital at Carnegie Hall, the lights were so intense for her defective eyes that she gave up performing. Ernest attempted playing the cello in high school, but from the beginning, it was clear that he was no musician. Instead, he deeply shared his father's fierce enthusiasm for the outdoors.

Ernest began fishing when he was three years old, and his fourth birthday present was an all-day fishing trip with his father. For his twelfth birthday, his grandfather gave him a single-barrel 20-gauge shotgun. His deep love of hunting and fishing in the north Michigan woods during his childhood and adolescence formed lasting impressions that would be ingredients for his short stories centering around Nick Adams, Hemingway's young fictional persona.

In high school, Hemingway played football, mostly lightweight football, because he was small and thin. Hoping for more success in another sport, Hemingway took up boxing. Years later, he would often write, using boxing metaphors; he would also tell people that it was a boxing accident that was responsible for his defective eyesight. Hemingway was always self-conscious about seeming less than the best at whatever he chose to do. For example, he had a lifelong difficulty pronouncing his l's; his sounded like w's. His perfectionist father always stressed that whatever Ernest did, he must "do it right." The stigma of having a slight speech defect and genetically flawed eyesight continually rankled Hemingway.

Hemingway's writing career began early. He was a reporter for The Trapeze, his high-school newspaper, and he published a couple of stories in the Tabula, the school's literary magazine. Ironically, he remained an atrocious speller throughout his life. Whenever editors would complain about his bad spelling, he'd retort, "Well, that's what you're hired to correct!"

After Ernest's high-school graduation, Dr. Hemingway realized that his son had no passion for further education, so he didn't encourage him to enroll in college. Neither did he encourage him to join the boys his age who were volunteering for the army and sailing to Europe to fight in World War I. Instead, Dr. Hemingway took another approach: He called the Kansas City Star to find out if his son could sign on as a cub reporter. He learned that an opening wouldn't be available until September, news that delighted Ernest because it meant that he could spend another summer in the north Michigan woods hunting and fishing before he began working in the adult world.

Arriving in Kansas City to work for the Star, young Hemingway began earning fifteen dollars a week. He was taught to write short sentences, avoid clichés, unnecessary adjectives, and construct good stories. He soon realized that a large part of Kansas City life was filled with crime and impulsive violence. It was an exciting time for the naive, eager, red-cheeked young man from the north woods who was determined to learn how to write well.

A few months passed, and despite the satisfying pace of his life and the thrill of seeing his work in print, Hemingway realized that most of the young men he knew were leaving to take part in the war in Europe. Hemingway's father was still opposed to his son's joining the army, and Hemingway himself knew that his defective eyesight would probably keep him from being accepted. However, Hemingway met Theodore Brumback, a fellow reporter with vision in only one eye at the Star, who suggested that Hemingway volunteer for the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. Hemingway's yearning to join the war effort was rekindled, and six months after he began his career as a newspaper reporter, he and Brumback resigned from the Star, said goodbye to their families, and headed to New York for their physicals. Hemingway received a B rating and was advised to get some glasses.

The letters that Hemingway wrote home to his parents while he was waiting to sail overseas were jubilant. The voyage from New York to France aboard the Chicago, however, was less exultant. Hemingway's second typhoid shot had left him nauseated and aching, and rough seas sent him retching to the rails several times.

At Bordeaux, France, Hemingway and Brumback boarded a train headed to Milan, Italy. Shortly after they settled in, a munitions factory exploded, and Hemingway was stunned to discover that "the dead are more women than men." After a few weeks of making routine ambulance runs and transporting dying and wounded men to hospitals, Hemingway grew impatient. Wanting to see more action, he traveled to the Austro-Italian border, where he finally had a sense of being at the wartime front.

During this time near the Austro-Italian border, Hemingway was severely wounded. An Austrian projectile exploded in the trenches and sent shrapnel ripping into his legs. Trying to carry an Italian soldier to safety, Hemingway caught a machine-gun bullet behind his kneecap and one in his foot. A few days later, he found himself on a train, returning to Milan. Later, writing about being wounded, he recalled that he felt life slipping from him. Some literary critics believe that it was this near death experience that obsessed Hemingway with a continual fear of death and a need to test his courage that lasted the rest of his life.

A few months later, the war was over and Hemingway returned to the States with a limp and a fleeting moment of celebrity. At home in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway immediately felt homesick for Italy. All of his friends were gone, and he received a letter from a nurse with whom he'd fallen in love while he was hospitalized. The news was not good: She had fallen in love with an Italian lieutenant. Ten years later, this nurse would become the model for the valiant Catherine Barkeley in A Farewell to Arms.

Returning to the north woods to find his emotional moorings, Hemingway fished, wrote some short-story sketches, and enjoyed a brief romance that would figure in "The End of Something" and "The Three-Day Blow." He also spoke to women's clubs about his wartime adventures, and one of the women in the audience, a monied Toronto matron, was so impressed with Hemingway that she hired him as a companion for her lame son.

Tutoring the boy and filling a scrapbook with writings in Canada, Hemingway then headed back to the Midwest, where he met Hadley Richardson, seven years older than he and an heiress to a small trust fund.

Hadley fell in love with Hemingway. Hemingway's ever-fretting, over-protective mother thought that Hadley was exactly what her rootless son needed; she prodded Hemingway to settle down and give up his gypsy travels and short-term, part-time jobs.

Despite his fears that marriage would destroy his way of living, Hemingway married Hadley, and they set up housekeeping, living on income from her trust fund. Soon, near-poverty depleted Hemingway's usual good nature, and friends urged him to move to Paris, where living expenses would be cheaper.

In Paris, Hemingway and Hadley lived in the Latin Quarter, a bohemian enclave of artists, poets, and writers. The Toronto Sun bought the articles that Hemingway submitted, as well as his political sketches, and Hemingway was pleased about the short stories he was writing. He was twenty-three years old and felt that he'd finally hit his stride as an author with a style that was authentically his own.

After covering the war between Greece and Turkey for the New York Sun, Hemingway returned to Paris and continued writing Nick Adams tales, including "A Way You'll Never Be." He was interrupted, though, when the Toronto Star insisted that he cover the Lausanne Peace Conference. While there, he urged Hadley to join him, and she did so, bringing all of his short stories, sketches, and poems in a valise that would be stolen in the Lyon train station.

Hemingway was so stunned with disbelief at the terrible loss that he immediately returned to Paris, convinced that Hadley surely hadn't packed even the carbon copies of his stories, but she had. Hemingway had lost everything that he'd written.

Ironically, American expatriate and writer Gertrude Stein had just spoken to Hemingway about loss, mentioning a garage keeper's off-hand comment: "You are all a lost generation," a casual remark, yet one that eventually would become world famous after Hemingway used it as an epigraph to his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This term "lost generation" would be instantly meaningful to Hemingway's readers. It would give a name to the attitudes of the post-World War I generation of Americans, especially to the young writers of that era who believed that their loves and hopes had been shattered by the war. They had been led down a glory trail to death — not for noble patriotic ideals, but for the greedy, materialistic gains of international power groups. The high-minded sentiments of their elders were not to be trusted; only reality was truth — and reality was harsh: Life was futile, often meaningless.

After the loss of his manuscripts, Hemingway followed Stein's advice to go to Spain; she promised him that he'd find new stories there. After his sojourn in Spain, Hemingway returned to Paris and from there to Canada, where Hadley gave birth to their first child. Afterward, Hemingway returned to Paris, where he began writing "Big Two-Hearted River." From there, he went to Austria, where he wrote more Nick Adams stories, as well as "Hills Like White Elephants."

Hemingway and Hadley were divorced in 1927, and he married Pauline Pfeiffer, an Arkansas heiress, who accompanied him to Africa, traveling 300 miles by train to reach Nairobi, and onward to the Kapti Plains, the foothills of the Ngong Hills, and the Serengeti Plain. Africa would be the setting for two of Hemingway's most famous short stories — "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

In 1940, Hemingway and Pauline were divorced, and he married writer Martha Gellhorn. They toured China, then established a residence in Cuba. When World War II began, Hemingway volunteered his services and his fishing boat, the Pilar, and cooperated with United States naval intelligence as a German submarine spotter in the Caribbean.

Wanting a still-more-active role in the war, Hemingway soon was a 45-year-old war correspondent barnstorming through Europe with the Allied invasion troops — and sometimes ahead of them. It is said that Hemingway liberated the Ritz Hotel in Paris and that when the Allied troops arrived, they were greeted by a notice on the entrance: "Papa Hemingway took good hotel. Plenty stuff in the cellar."

Following yet another divorce, this one in 1944, Hemingway married Mary Welsh, a Time magazine correspondent. The couple lived in Venice for a while, then returned to Havana, Cuba. In 1950, Across the River and into the Trees appeared, but it was neither a critical nor a popular success. His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), however, restored Hemingway's literary stature, and he was awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in literature.

In January 1954, Hemingway was off for another of his many African safaris and was reported dead after two airplane crashes in two days. He survived, though, despite severe internal and spinal injuries and a concussion. When he read newspaper obituary notices about his death, he noted with great pleasure that they were favorable. That same year, Hemingway received the Swedish Academy's Nobel Prize in literature, "for his powerful style forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evidenced in The Old Man and the Sea ."

During the next few years, Hemingway was not happy, and during 1961, he was periodically plagued by high blood pressure and clinical depression. He received shock therapy during two long confinements at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but most of the prescribed treatment for his depression was of little value. Hemingway died July 2, 1961, at his home, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It seems as if there were always two Hemingways. One was the adventurer — the grinning, bearded "Papa" of the news photographs; the other was the skillful, sensitive author Hemingway, who patiently wrote, rewrote, and edited his work.

Certainly each of the short stories discussed in this volume represents a finished, polished "gem" — Hemingway's own word for his short stories. No word is superfluous, and no more words are needed. Along with such well-known short-story writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and John Steinbeck, Hemingway is considered by literary critics to be one of the world's finest.

Previous Helen

Next Hemingway's Writing Style

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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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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Ernest Hemingway, 1899–1961: A Brief Biography

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Born in a Chicago suburb on July 21, 1899, Ernest Hemingway was a child of the twentieth century, responding to its every pressure, recording its progress, and aging as it aged. His life seemed to embody the promise of America: with good fortune, hard work, talent, ambition, and a little ruthlessness a man can create himself in the image of his choosing. As a young man in Paris, Hemingway dedicated himself to his writing, and he let nothing interfere with his goal, not parents nor wives, not friends nor children. He created a public persona to match his prose, becoming the person he wanted to be. Like other self-made Americans, however, Hemingway’s invented self was a mask that he wore with less and less ease as he grew older. Despite this public image, his raucous life and several wives, and the critics who turned on him, he left stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become a permanent part of our cultural inheritance.

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FAMOUS AUTHORS

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway; one of the most renowned author and journalist of this era, was born on the 21st of July 1899 in Oak Park, Chicago, USA. Born to a simple family, Hemingway worked his way from a reporter for The Kansas City Star then a volunteer for an ambulance unit in World War-I, a journalist in Chicago to a Nobel prize awarded writer who inspired wide range of authors and writers. An institute in himself Hemingway was awarded Nobel Prize for his contribution to literature in 1954.

His writing style became an inspiration for many crime and pulp fiction novels. He wrote in a very distinctive minimalist way. Writing short stories, Hemingway knew how to get the most from the least. With his tightly written prose, he was a master of narration and a brilliant writer. He was not in favor of using emotions. He believed it was easy and useless to do so. Instead he formed sculptures to portray the ‘original feeling’.

His first books include ‘Three stories and Ten Poems’ (1923), ‘In Our Time’ (1924) and ‘The Torrents of Spring’ although his first serious novel and without a doubt the reason of his establishing fame was ‘The Sun also Rises’ (1926) which was later recognized as his greatest work piece. Other major works include ‘Death in the Afternoon’, The Green Hills of Africa’ and ‘To Have and Have Not’.

Though a successful writer, Hemingway never disowned his past. He shared his life experiences on various occasions. He remembered his mother dressing him up as a little girl and the sorry incident of his father taking his own life in 1928. He used his life experiences as inspirations for many of his books. When the United States entered the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to work in an ambulance unit in the Italian army. His first duty was to visit an explosion site where his unit had to salvage the remains of female workers. He described this unpleasant incident in his book ‘Death in the Afternoon’. Another book ‘A farewell to Arms’ was inspired by a love affair he had with a nurse during his stay at the hospital.

After returning home from the war, Hemingway became a reporter for the American and Canadian newspapers. He was then sent to Europe to cover happenings such as the Greece Revolution. In 1921, he moved to Paris where he worked as an article writer for the ‘Toronto Star’.

Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954. Although he always thought this was given to him in pity due to his obituary notices. Hemingway started going into depression with the deaths of some of his close friends. He was also seriously injured in two successive plane crashes. He received third degree burns while at a fishing expedition shortly after his recovery from the plane crash. Hemingway went through a lot of hurt and depression during the 1950s till his death. Later the doctors believed he had a genetic disease in which a person is prone to suicide due to inherent depression. During his last years his behavior is said to resemble his father’s before he had committed suicide. In 1961 Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.

Hemingway’ distinct influence on literature can be witnessed in continuous tributes and recognitions that followed his demise.

Buy Books by Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemmingway: A Biography

Ernest hemminway (1899 – 1961).

Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. More works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Several of his works are now classics of American literature. In 1961, like his father, a brother and a sister, Hemingway committed suicide. A niece, Margaux Hemingway, the Holywood star, also committed suicide.

What places Hemingway among the twenty top American writers is the style he developed, that set the benchmark for 20th century prose writing in the whole of the English speaking world. He changed the nature of American writing by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style, in the words of literary critic, Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard, ‘in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.’

When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize, the citation commented that it was for 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.’ His first novel, The Sun Also Rises is written in the minimal, lean, muscular, stripped-down prose for which he became famous and which influenced the writers who came after him.

Perhaps most famous for his war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls , he began his fiction writing with short stories, in which he taught himself how to edit his prose, stripping it to the bone and creating a greater intensity by the omission rather than the inclusion of detail. The result is to create significant connections and meaning beneath the surface of a sparse, apparently simple, almost monosyllabic narrative, using the simple sentences that a child might use. He also employs cinematic techniques such as cutting quickly from one scene to the next and of splicing one scene into another. Intentional scene omissions allow the reader to fill in the gap, creating for herself a three dimensional prose. As a result of that example it became almost impossible for 20th Century fiction writers to revert to the kind of prose that preceded Hemingway’s.

It wasn’t just writers and critics that showed enthusiasm for Hemingway’s works: he had a huge following among general fiction readers. His universal themes of love, death, war and loss permeate his writings in the same way that they did that of Shakespeare  and many other great writers, as well as being recurring themes in American literature.  The critic, Susan Beegel, in spite of an objection to what she sees as an anti-semitic, homophobic thread in his works, sums it up thus: ‘Throughout his remarkable body of fiction, he tells the truth about human fear, guilt, betrayal, violence, cruelty, drunkenness, hunger, greed, apathy, ecstasy, tenderness, love and lust.’

The extent of Hemingway’s presence in the popular culture is testament to his significance as a 20th century literary figure. There are several bars named ‘Harry’s Bar’ around the world, in recognition of the bar in the novel Across the River and Into the Trees . There are also many restaurant’s called ‘Hemingway’s.’ A line of furniture includes ‘the Kilimanjaro bedside table’ and a ‘Catherine’ sofa; a line of Hemingway safari clothes has been created and there is an expensive Hemingway fountain pen. His  novels have been made into films, sometimes more than once, and several short stories have been adapted for film and television.

Read biographies of the top 20 American authors >>

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Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection

Ernest Hemingway was different than other authors of his time not only because his style of writing, but also because of what he enjoyed to do with his free time in his exciting life.

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Ernest Hemingway

Early life and education.

Ernest Hemingway was born on the 21 st of July in 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. He was a bright son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician. He received his early education in various public schools. He was an outstanding student writer. Strangely, after leaving school in 1917 he did not attend college for further education. He wanted to join military services but his defective eyesight led to repeated rejections. However, he managed to participate in World War I as an ambulance driver. His early life experiences coupled with love and war rigors became settings for most of his future writings.

Personal Life

Ernest Hemingway married Mary in 1946. Unfortunately, the family suffered health problems and mishaps in the years following the war: Hemingway and Mary had some serious accidents as well as deaths of literary friends like Ford Madox Ford, William Butler Yeats Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce . These tragedies threw him into the hell of depression. Despite all these challenges, the couple remained faithful to each other.

Some Important Facts of His Life

• He won Pulitzer Prize in May 1952 for his novel , The Old Man and The Sea.
• He received Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1954.
• His wife, Mary Hemingway, established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in 1970s, she donated Hemingway’s papers to the John F. Kennedy Library.
• Several prizes have been established in his honor including Hemingway Award and Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Ernest Hemingway started writing at a young age and his lucid and succinct writing style exerted a powerful influence on world literature. He became a published writer in 1925, when his first important book , In Our Time, got published in America . Later, in 1926, his first novel, The Sun Also Rises , enabled him to score the first solid success. The novel deals with the purposeless expatriates in Spain and France. His next work, The Torrents of Spring , also appeared in 1926. His reputation as a master of shorter fiction skyrocketed with the publication of Men without Women that published in 1927. This well-received work followed by another notable publication, A Farewell to Arms , that came up in 1929. The novel accounts for his real war experiences as a young soldier in Italy; he successfully infused war stories into a love story . He fictionalized his passion for bullfighting and unbound love for Spain in his next publication, Death in the Afternoon . Weaving the considerable experiences of Spain in peace and war, he came up with his next finest work, For Whom the Bell Tolls . His other notable works include The Old Man and the Sea and Across the River and Into the Trees .

After establishing his career as a writer, Ernest Hemingway earned huge success in life. He gained immense popularity on account of his thoughtful ideas and unconventional style. Using his unique simple style of writing, he has shed light on the horrors of warfare, biting loneliness, and the horrible sadness of losing loved ones. By applying techniques like irony , contrast , and autobiographical details, he talks about the emotions people experience in life. His works deal with simple yet complex diction to enhance the unique perspective presented to the readers. Ernest Hemingway intentionally used this distinct style to separate himself from other writers. The recurring thematic strands in most of the writings are love, war, wilderness , and man versus nature. Regarding literary devices , he often turns to metaphors , foreshadowing , imagery , and similes to create a unique style.

Some Important Works of Ernest Hemingway

• Best Novels : Some of his best novels include The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls , and The Old Man and the Sea.
• Other Works: Besides writing novels, he tried his hands in other areas, too. Some of his best short stories include “Indian Camp”, “True at First Light”, “The Killers,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy.”

Ernest Hemingway’s Impacts on Future Literature

Ernest Hemingway was a dynamic writer who started his writing career at a young age and became popular in his life. His unique writing style and literary qualities of his masterpieces brought praiseworthy changes to the world of literature. Also, he had a significant influence on a diverse range of writers and critics and other influential figures. He expressed his thoughts and ideas in his literary pieces so well that even today writers tend to imitate his style, considering him a role model for producing simple fiction.

Famous Quotes

• “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” ( A Farewell to Arms )
• “You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring , as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.” ( A Moveable Feast)
• “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)
• “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” (Men Without Women)

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Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961: A Brief Biography

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A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway’s Biography The Enduring Legacy

Reading comprehension: ernest hemingway’s biography.

Develop your reading skills. Read the following biography of Ernest Hemingway and do the comprehension task.

The Enduring Legacy of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway, an American author and journalist, left an indelible mark on 20th-century literature with his distinctive style and adventurous life. Born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway’s upbringing in the Midwest shaped his worldview and influenced his literary pursuits. Tragically, he passed away on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, where he succumbed to suicide.

Hemingway’s writing is characterized by its economical and understated prose, which had a profound impact on the development of fiction in the 20th century. His own life of adventure, coupled with his iconic public persona, continues to inspire subsequent generations of writers and readers alike. Most of Hemingway’s prolific output occurred between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, culminating in his recognition with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Throughout his career, he penned seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two non-fiction works, with additional publications released posthumously.

Following his high school graduation, Hemingway briefly worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before embarking on a journey to the Italian front to serve as an ambulance driver during World War I. His wartime experiences provided the backdrop for his seminal novel, “A Farewell to Arms,” published in 1929. Subsequently, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in 1922 and relocated to Paris, where he immersed himself in the vibrant expatriate community of the 1920s, interacting with leading modernist writers and artists.

Despite his initial marriage, Hemingway’s personal life was marked by turmoil, with subsequent marriages to Pauline Pfeiffer and Martha Gellhorn ending in divorce. Drawing from his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway crafted another literary masterpiece, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” His encounters during World War II led to his marriage to Mary Welsh, but the relationship ultimately faltered.

In the later years of his life, Hemingway’s health deteriorated, exacerbated by two plane crashes during a safari in Africa. Despite the success of works like “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway battled chronic pain and illness, ultimately leading to his tragic decision to end his life in 1961.

Hemingway’s legacy endures through his profound literary contributions and his enduring influence on subsequent generations of writers. Though his life was marked by triumphs and tragedies alike, his literary achievements continue to captivate readers around the world, ensuring his place among the literary giants of the 20th century.

Source: Wikipedia

Comprehension:

• Hemingway became a reporter after he had finished university. a. True b. False
• He enlisted as an ambulance driver in World War I. a. True b. False
• He married four times. a. True b. False
• He died in a plane crash. a. True b. False.

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Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work

Table of Contents

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist who is widely considered one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. His sparse, direct prose style and his focus on themes such as courage, stoicism, and masculinity made him a literary icon of his time, and his works continue to be studied and celebrated today.

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Early Life and Career:

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a musician. Hemingway attended Oak Park High School, where he developed an interest in writing and journalism. After graduation, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper as a reporter and later as a foreign correspondent in Europe during World War I.

In 1921, Hemingway returned to the United States and settled in Chicago, where he worked as a freelance writer. He soon became involved in the city’s literary scene and began publishing his own short stories. In 1925, he published his first major work, the novel “The Sun Also Rises,” which established him as a leading voice of the “Lost Generation,” a group of writers who came of age during World War I and were disillusioned by the post-war world.

Major Works:

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Hemingway’s early works, such as “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms,” are characterized by their spare, direct prose style and their focus on themes of courage, honor, and masculinity. In “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway explores the lives of expatriate Americans living in Paris and Spain, and their struggles with love, war, and the sense of disillusionment that followed the war. “A Farewell to Arms,” set during World War I, tells the story of an American soldier who falls in love with a nurse and is wounded in battle.

Hemingway’s later works, such as “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea,” continue to explore these themes while also addressing the nature of courage, sacrifice, and the human condition. “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” set during the Spanish Civil War, follows an American volunteer fighting against the Fascists and his relationship with a young woman he meets in the mountains. “The Old Man and the Sea,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, tells the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles to catch a giant marlin and who embodies the human spirit of endurance and resilience.

Style and Themes:

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Hemingway’s prose style is characterized by its economy and simplicity. He believed in the power of understatement and the importance of leaving much unsaid. His style is often described as “hard-boiled,” and he is known for his use of short, simple sentences and his avoidance of adjectives and adverbs.

Hemingway’s themes include courage, stoicism, masculinity, and the struggle to find meaning in a chaotic and often brutal world. He was also interested in the nature of war and its impact on individuals and society, as well as the relationship between men and women and the challenges of love and intimacy.

Ernest Hemingway’s legacy is one of immense literary influence and cultural significance. His sparse, direct prose style and his focus on themes of courage, honor, and masculinity have made him a literary icon of his time, and his works continue to be studied and celebrated today.

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Hemingway’s influence can be seen in the works of countless writers who have been inspired by his style and themes. His impact on American literature and culture is incalculable, and his influence on the wider world of literature and the arts is equally significant.

Themes and Style

Ernest Hemingway’s writing is known for its focus on themes of courage, stoicism, masculinity, and the struggle to find meaning in a chaotic and often brutal world. Hemingway’s characters are often grappling with questions of identity, purpose, and the meaning of life, and his stories frequently explore themes of love, loss, and the human condition.

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- One of Hemingway’s most prominent themes is that of “grace under pressure.” This phrase, which Hemingway used frequently, refers to the idea that a person’s true character is revealed in moments of crisis. Hemingway’s characters are often faced with difficult or dangerous situations, and it is their ability to remain calm, courageous, and focused that sets them apart.

Hemingway was also deeply interested in the nature of war and its impact on individuals and society. Many of his works, including “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea,” address the subject of war and its aftermath, exploring questions of trauma, loss, and the search for meaning in the face of suffering.

Ernest Hemingway’s writing is characterized by its economy and simplicity. He believed in the power of understatement and the importance of leaving much unsaid, and his style is often described as “hard-boiled.”

Hemingway’s prose is known for its short, simple sentences and its avoidance of adjectives and adverbs. He believed that too many adjectives and adverbs diluted the impact of a sentence and that the reader should be able to understand the meaning of a sentence without the need for elaborate description.

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Hemingway was also known for his use of dialogue, which he used to convey character and meaning. His characters often speak in short, staccato sentences that reveal their personalities and motivations.

In addition to his prose style, Hemingway was also known for his use of symbolism. Many of his works, including “The Old Man and the Sea,” contain symbols that represent larger ideas or themes. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” for example, the giant marlin that the old man catches represents the struggle for life and the human spirit of endurance and resilience.

Ernest Hemingway Biography and Work:- Hemingway’s style has had a significant influence on American literature and culture. His spare, direct prose style and his focus on themes of courage, stoicism, and masculinity have made him a literary icon of his time, and his works continue to be studied and celebrated today.

Ernest Hemingway’s impact on American literature and culture cannot be overstated. Through his writing, he explored themes of courage, stoicism, and the struggle to find meaning in a chaotic world. His style, characterized by its economy and simplicity, has influenced countless writers since his time. Hemingway’s legacy continues to live on today, and his works remain an important part of the literary canon.

Q. What is Ernest Hemingway famous for?

Ans. Ernest Hemingway is famous for his influential writing style, which emphasized economy, simplicity, and understatement. He is also known for his exploration of themes such as masculinity, courage, and the struggle to find meaning in a chaotic world. Some of his most famous works include “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Q. What was Hemingway’s writing style?

Ans. Hemingway’s writing style is characterized by its economy and simplicity. He believed in the power of understatement and the importance of leaving much unsaid, and his style is often described as “hard-boiled.” Hemingway’s prose is known for its short, simple sentences and its avoidance of adjectives and adverbs.

Q. What are some of Hemingway’s most famous works?

Ans. Some of Hemingway’s most famous works include “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” He also wrote many short stories, including “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Q. What themes did Hemingway explore in his writing?

Ans. Hemingway’s writing often explored themes such as masculinity, courage, and the struggle to find meaning in a chaotic world. He was also interested in the nature of war and its impact on individuals and society. Many of his works address the subject of war and its aftermath, exploring questions of trauma, loss, and the search for meaning in the face of suffering.

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• The Hemingway Review

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn (review)

• Scott Donaldson
• University of Idaho Department of English
• Volume 37, Number 1, Fall 2017
• pp. 114-119
• 10.1353/hem.2017.0021
• View Citation

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Ernest Hemingway

(1899-1961), american novelist and journalist.

Quick Facts

Ernest Miller Hemingway was a journalist, short story writer, and novelist who is best known for creating the “iceberg theory,” which along with his prose style, influenced 21st-century literature. This literary theory states that a writer should say a little but imply a lot, just like how an iceberg sits under the water. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Throughout his lifetime,   Hemingway published seven novels   and six short story collections. He also finished three nonfiction novels.

Key Life Events

• Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on 21 July 1899.
• He served as an ambulance driver in Italy, in WWI.
• Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a journalist around the world, including during WWII.
• Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for ‘ The Old Man and the Sea ‘.
• He ended his own life with his favorite shotgun in 1961.

Interesting Facts

• Hemingway was a notorious womanizer–marrying four times and having many affairs.
• He met Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso in Paris.
• He survived two successive plane crashes.
• Hemingway was monitored throughout his life by the FBI.
• His last wife initially reported that his death was accidental.

Read more   Ernest Hemingway facts here .

Famous Ernest Hemingway Books

‘ The Old Man and the Sea ‘  was the novella that finally won Hemingway the Pulitzer. It is quite short and was   written in Cuba over a brief period in 1951 . The   story follows the life and struggles of Santiago , a poor and likable fisherman in the middle of a terrible dry spell. It was the last major fiction writing that Hemingway published during his life.

‘ For Whom the Bell Tolls’  is considered by some to be Hemingway’s best novel. The novel tells the story of an American teacher called Robert Jordan, who gets involved in the Spanish Civil War, as Hemingway did himself. He wrote the novel in Havana, Cuba, as well as in Key West, Florida, and Sun Valley, Idaho.

‘ The Sun Also Rises’  was Hemingway’s first major novel and is recognized as one of his greatest works, inspired by a trip he took to Spain in 1925. The novel focuses on Gertrude Stein’s coined “lost generation”, who are a generation rife with disillusionment caused by the horrors of the World War, and who are ready to move on from the traditions of the older generation. The reviews of the novel were mixed when it first came out, but it is now considered to be an American classic, and some argue that it is the best Hemingway book.

‘ A Farewell to Arms’  is set in WWI and is a first-person story told from the perspective of Frederic Henry, a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The book is inspired by events in Hemingway’s own life.

‘ Complete Short Stories’  is not a novel, but it does contain some of Hemingway’s best-known stories. One of these, which is studied around the world as an example of the iceberg theory, is ‘ Hills Like White Elephants ‘.

Explore the   best books by Ernest Hemingway .

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on 21 July 1899. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a musician. The couple was well respected and raised Hemingway in a good neighborhood. Later in life, Hemingway stated that he hated his mother and had fonder memories of his father, who took him camping, fishing, and hunting in Northern Michigan. While in high school, he eddied the school’s newspaper and yearbook.

After school, he went to work for “ The Kansas City Star”  as a reporter. He was only there for six months, but some scholars believe the   newspaper’s style influenced Hemingway’s own . In 1917 he signed up to be an ambulance driver in Italy and spent time on the Italian front. Many of his experiences along the way, like his love for Spain and bullfighting, can be found in his novel ‘ Death in the Afternoon’  which is non-fiction. He was injured in July (when he was only eighteen years old) of that year after driving an ambulance for two months. He received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery for helping to get Italian soldiers to safety. While recovering in the hospital, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse in Milan, who eventually married someone else, breaking Hemingway’s heart.

Over the following years, Hemingway spent time in Toronto, Chicago, and Paris. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and sailed for France, where he met and fell in love with Hadley Richardson. The two lived in Paris in a small apartment while Hemingway continued to work. He also met several famous writers and artists during this period who advised and encouraged Ernest. After an orignal release in Paris in 1924, his first important work, ‘ In Our Time ‘   was published in New York in 1925.

The couple had a son in 1923, and three years later, he published ‘ The Sun Also Rises,’  the novel that is often considered to be his best. Hadley and Hemingway divorced the next year, and he married Pauline Pfeiffer. During 1920s and 1930s, he also spent time in Spain, covering the Spanish Civil War. The events that he observed would inspire him to write ‘ For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

He married again in 1940 to Martha Gellhorn, whom he left after meeting another woman named Mary Welsh. The two met while Hemingway was traveling to London. She was a   Time  correspondent. His divorce from Martha Gellhorn was finalized in 1945, and he was already planning to marry Mary Welsh. In 1947 he was awarded the Bronze Star for his courage and bravery during World War II. He had traveled  across Europe as a journalist while under fire throughout combat areas in order to get photographs.

Later Writing Career

From 1942 to 1945, Hemingway chose not to write. His reputation suffered because of it, as did his outlook on life. His friends, including WB Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, died, and Mary Welsh had an ectopic pregnancy. He published ‘ Across the River’ and ‘into the Trees’  to negative reviews in 1950. It was inspired by a supposedly platonic relationship he had with a nineteen-year-old in Venice. Hemingway wrote ‘ For Whom the Bell Tolls’  in Cuba, as well as the United States. After its publication, it became a best-seller. It was nominated but did not receive the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1952, ‘ The Old Man and the Sea’  were chosen as a book-of-the-month selection and won Hemingway the Pulitzer. It was followed in 1954 by the Novel Prize in Literature.

Hemingway was involved in a plane crash in 1954 which almost cost him his life. He was bedridden for several months. He continued to fall ill over the next years, still suffering from plane crash injuries. While recovering, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.  He mostly finished the manuscript of his memoir ‘ A Moveable Feast’  in 1959. Hemingway’s mental state was deteriorating towards the end of the 1950s. He was treated at the Mayo Clinic with electroconvulsive therapy.  He committed suicide in July 21 of 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho.

Influence from Other Writers

Ernest Hemingway was notably influenced by writers such as William Faulkner, W.B. Yeats, Mark Twain, and his mentor Gertrude Stein, among others.

Literature by Ernest Hemingway

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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.

Related: 12 Brilliant Female Authors You’ve Never Heard Of

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.

Keep Reading: 

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5 Martha Gellhorn Books That Stand on Their Own

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

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Ernest Hemingway: A Brief Biography from Beginning to the End Paperback – June 7, 2021

History Hub presents a brief biography of Ernest Hemingway from beginning to end, whose remarkable story impacts our lives even today.

Ernest Hemingway sits on the pantheon of few great authors together with Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose words were more than enough to mold the shape of literature. Besides his books, Hemingway’s adventurous life and public image earned him admiration from succeeding generations. Gaining widespread popularity during the first and second World Wars, Hemingway’s books were among the bestselling and critically acclaimed works of his time. But the life of the Pulitzer-winner and Nobel laureate had never been smooth-sailing from the start. Hemmingway filled it with many challenges and problems hidden behind his success as an author and his public image of an "outdoor man."

Discover in this short yet concise biography the remarkable story of a life who impacted future generations. This book also contains 30 questions for an in-depth discussion into the life of Ernest Hemingway.

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• Print length 44 pages
• Language English
• Publication date June 7, 2021
• Dimensions 6 x 0.11 x 9 inches
• ISBN-13 979-8516815645
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B096TW82QM
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (June 7, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 44 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8516815645
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.89 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.11 x 9 inches

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10 Best Ernest Hemingway Movie Adaptations, Ranked

T he American Noble and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is among the most celebrated authors who ever lived. His work, which was mostly produced between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, often offers audiences thoughtful meditations on solitude and the complications of life, making for some of the most intriguing novels ever written.

Thanks to his straightforward writing and approach to both novels and short stories, Hemingway has revolutionized modern literature, inspiring many writers even today. Given how many incredible and highly influential books the prolific Hemingway has worked on over the years, it only makes sense that a good chunk of those were adapted to the big screen at some point. As such, we celebrate the artist's work by looking back and analyzing the best Ernest Hemingway movie adaptations , from The Sun Also Rises to To Have and Have Not .

'The Sun Also Rises' (1957)

Director: henry king.

Filmed on location in France, Spain, and Mexico, The Sun Also Rises stars Tyrone Power , Ava Gardner , Mel Ferrer , and Errol Flynn . It focuses on a journalist injured in World War I, who moves to Paris for a fresh beginning. Complications arise when he forges new connections with a group of expatriates living a carefree life and finds himself in love with a woman named Brett Ashley, played wonderfully by Gardner.

Although it is not the best of the best Ernest Hemingway adaptations (it can feel a bit underwhelming after reading the book), The Sun Also Rises is still an entertaining and beautifully illustrated take on the novel of the same name , which is a fictionalized account of the events that the author experienced in Pamplona ( via Town&Country ) and one of his major works. Supposedly, according to Hemingway himself, the best part about the film is Errol Flynn.

Rent on Apple TV

'A Farewell to Arms' (1932)

Director: frank borzage.

The first Hemingway novel to make it to the big screen tackles themes of war and purpose. A Farewell to Arms sees an American serving as an ambulance driver, Lt. Henry ( Gary Cooper ), and an English nurse named Catherine Barkley ( Helen Hayes ) fall head over heels for each other against the backdrop of World War I Italy.

Frank Borzage's pre-code romance drama, which was based on Ernest Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, earned Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Sound, though it was also nominated for the big prize, Best Picture, as well as Best Art Direction. Although it sent out a hopeful message about such dark times, A Farewell to Arms was one of the films banned for its treatment of war as well as sexual content when it premiered.

Watch on Amazon Prime

'Islands in the Stream' (1977)

Director: franklin j. schaffner.

Franklin J. Schaffner 's Oscar-nominated feature is set in the British-controlled Bahamas and stars George C. Scott as the lead character. The movie portrays the story of an isolated sculptor who has left the civilized world to live a simple life in the Caribbean and revolves around the visit of his three sons before the start of World War II.

Islands in the Stream is undoubtedly one of the best Hemingway big screen adaptations ; it was assembled by his widow, Mary Hemingway , from among 332 works in progress Hemingway left behind at his death (via The New York Times). It ultimately resulted in an enthralling narrative that intrigues audiences, strong performances at its heart, and a great meditation on freedom and courage.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (1943)

Director: sam wood.

Directed and produced by Sam Wood , 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls is now regarded as an epic American war film. It stars Gary Cooper and the extraordinary Ingrid Bergman (in her first technicolor movie) and tells the story of an American International Brigades volunteer, who is fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He ultimately falls for a young woman fighter.

Nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, Wood's engaging movie earns a spot among the best movies based on Hemingway books , and that is thanks to its masterful acting and great casting. While far from a masterpiece (and definitely not everyone's cup of tea), For Whom the Bell Tolls is undeniably well-made.

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'The Killers' (1964)

Director: don siegel.

While John Cassavetes is known for being the father of independent cinema, given his career as a filmmaker , he was also a talented actor. The Killers proves this as he steps into the shoes of a car driver, the victim of a hit man ( Lee Marvin ) and his crime partner ( Clu Gulager ) who surprises them both by not getting away.

Don Siegel 's neo-noir crime film based on the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name is the second big-screen adaptation of the book. Although not as good as the first one (nor the director's best effort), 1964's The Killers is nonetheless tense and stylish , offering an entertaining narrative that will likely satisfy viewers who have read the novel. What's more? Expect Ronald Reagan in his final film role before retiring from acting in 1966 to enter politics.

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'The Old Man and the Sea' (1958)

Director: john sturges.

Viewers are introduced to an elderly Cuban fisherman, played by Spencer Tracy , who hasn't caught anything for 84 days in this Ernest Hemingway big-screen adaptation. His only companion? A young boy, Manolin ( Felipe Pazos ), is forbidden to join him on his fishing journey. On the 85th day, he finally catches a marlin, struggling to bring it back to the shore for three days and nights.

The Old Man and the Sea deservedly took home the Academy Award for Best Score. However, despite the incredible music John Sturges' movie features, its strongest aspect is perhaps the message it sends about persistence and courage . Despite its flaws, Hemingway's tale — which earned the author a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize — is perfectly brought to life in this beautifully shot 1958 film. Tracy was Oscar-nominated, too.

'Captain Khorshid' (1987)

Director: nasser taghvai.

Made in Iran by talented filmmaker Nasser Taghvai , Captain Khorshid is one of the few Ernest Hemingway adaptations that aren't English-spoken. Taghvai's work is based on the author's novel To Have and Have Not but changes the setting to Cuba, the south of Iran, and the Persian Gulf. The plot follows a sailor ( Dariush Arjmand ) who is asked to take dangerous criminals out of the country with his boat. He manages to do this despite only having one hand.

Considered one of the best Iranian movies of all time, Captain Khorshid does a brilliant job of altering Hemingway's story's backdrop , adapting it to different circumstances, and providing audiences with a fresh and intriguing new take on the well-known novel. With great music and performances, the engaging and graphic Captain Khorshid is, all in all, a really solid adaptation.

Captain Khorshid is not available for streaming, renting, or purchasing at this time.

'The Breaking Point' (1950)

Director: michael curtiz.

The Breaking Point is the second adaptation of To Have and Have Not and features John Garfield (in his second to last film role) and Patricia Neal as the lead. In the movie, the captain of a charter boat who is facing financial difficulties finds himself forced to resort to illegal activities to keep up with the payments on his boat.

While Michael Curtiz 's The Breaking Point is arguably on a different level than that of Howard Hawks ' movie, the filmmaker does a pretty good job at adapting the Ernest Hemingway novel — perhaps an even better one, if we consider how faithful to the book both film versions are. Be that as it may, Curtiz's classic film noir is a heart-wrenching and fascinating tale of desperation and corruption .

'The Killers' (1946)

Director: robert siodmak.

Featuring Ava Gardner in one of her best roles (though she could've gotten more screen time), the first adaptation of The Killers endures the best. In this version, audiences take a sneak peek into an insurance detective's investigation into the execution by two professional hitmen of a former boxer, Swede ( Burt Lancaster ), who was unresistant to his murder.

Robert Siodmak 's compelling movie is told in reverse, which was kind of innovative for the time it was released. For film noir buffs, the quintessential The Killers is essential viewing, standing among the best of its genre during the 1940s. Plus, what is so great about Siodmak's movie is how it fully expands on Hemingway's story and gives it greater dimension , resulting in a way-better-than-average adaptation. As expected, Gardner shines brightly in her breakthrough role.

'To Have and Have Not' (1944)

Director: howard hawks.

Regardless of how far from a close of an adaptation it is, To Have and Have Not is an undeniable romance classic . Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in two of their most memorable roles (the iconic real-life couple met on the set), the movie is set during World War II and follows Harry Morgan as he helps transport a French Resistance leader ( Walter Surovy ) and his wife ( Dolores Moran ) to Martinique. In the meantime, he finds himself swept off his feet by a beautiful lounge singer.

The fantastic acting performances and incredible narrative elevate this Ernest Hemingway performance to higher grounds. However, it is Bogart and Bacall's chemistry that makes To Have and Have Not so irresistible. The film was understandably one of the highest-grossing movies of the 1940s and endures as one of the most influential American features of all time.

NEXT: The 10 Best F. Scott Fitzgerald Movie Adaptations, Ranked