Ernest Hemingway

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ernest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly clothes to match his older sister, aiming for the two to look like twins. That same mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, made her reluctant son practice the cello. Years later, Hemingway would credit those lessons with shaping the "contrapuntal structure" of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The gap between the boy in the frilly dress and the man who chased wars across two continents is where the real story lives.

  By the time he died, on the 2nd of July 1961, at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway had produced seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works, some of which had become fixtures of American literature. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had also survived two plane crashes in Africa, fought in two world wars, endured multiple serious head injuries, and buried nearly every literary friend he had. How did a reporter's son from a Chicago suburb build a style that, according to his Nobel citation, shaped the prose of an entire era? And what was left of him by the end?

• 2. A Boy From Oak Park

  ›

  Oak Park was the kind of town where resident Frank Lloyd Wright noted, "So many churches for so many good people to go to." It was conservative, prosperous, and just west of Chicago. Hemingway's father, Clarence, was a physician who took his son hunting and fishing at the family's summer property on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey in northern Michigan. Those trips to the woods and lakes of the Upper Peninsula gave Hemingway the instinct for remote places that shaped both his life and his fiction.

  At Oak Park and River Forest High School, he boxed, played water polo, and competed in track and field. He also edited the school newspaper and the yearbook, writing under the pen name Ring Lardner Jr. as a tribute to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune. After graduation in 1917 he took a job as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star. He stayed only six months, but the Star's style guide left a permanent mark. Its instruction to "use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive, not negative" became, as Hemingway later acknowledged, a foundation for his prose.

• 3. The War That Made Him

  ›

  Hemingway tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected for poor eyesight. In December 1917 he volunteered with the American Red Cross Motor Corps instead, signing on as an ambulance driver for the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to retrieve the shredded remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, an experience he later described in his 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments."

  On the 8th of July 1918, at Fossolta di Piave, right after he had brought chocolate and cigarettes to men at the front line, the group came under mortar fire. Hemingway was only 18 years old. Despite being seriously wounded, he carried Italian soldiers to safety and was decorated with the Italian War Merit Cross and the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor. He told the story later with unusual clarity: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."

  He spent six months recuperating at a Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, seven years his senior. He expected her to follow him to America after his return in January 1919. In March she wrote to say she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that the rejection devastated and scarred the young man. From that point forward, Hemingway followed a pattern in relationships: abandoning a partner before she could abandon him. The fishing trip he took to Michigan's Upper Peninsula that September, trying to settle back into ordinary life, became the basis for his short story "Big Two-Hearted River".

• 4. Paris and the Lost Generation

  ›

  Sherwood Anderson, whom Hemingway had met while working in Chicago, convinced the young couple to skip Rome and go to Paris instead, writing letters of introduction for them. Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, arrived in late 1921; she was eight years his senior, red-haired, and had a steady income that let him write. He rented a small walk-up at 74 in the Latin Quarter and a separate room nearby for work, filing stories for the Toronto Star as a foreign correspondent.

  Gertrude Stein became his mentor and introduced him to the painters and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she called the "Lost Generation" - a term Hemingway made famous with The Sun Also Rises. At Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company in 1922, he met Ezra Pound, who was fourteen years older and who had just finished editing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Pound introduced Hemingway to James Joyce, with whom he frequently went on what Hemingway called "alcoholic sprees". During his first twenty months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star and covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna.

  Then, in December 1922, Hadley brought a suitcase to the train station Gare de Lyon, intending to join Hemingway in Geneva. The suitcase contained almost all of his fiction and short stories. She lost it. Hemingway was devastated and furious. What survived became the two stories in his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, published in Paris during his absence. On his birthday, the 21st of July 1925, three years after the loss of the suitcase, he began writing the draft of The Sun Also Rises. He finished it eight weeks later.

• 5. The Novels and the Marriages

  ›

  The Sun Also Rises was published in October 1926 to good reviews and was, as biographer Meyers notes, "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work". Hemingway wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the point of the book was that "the earth abideth forever" and that the characters, though "battered", were not lost. His marriage to Hadley, however, was. During the revisions he had begun an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a daughter of a wealthy Arkansas family who had come to Paris to work for Vogue. Hadley discovered the affair in early 1926, asked for a separation that summer, and filed for divorce in November. She accepted as a settlement the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May 1927, having converted to Catholicism before the wedding.

  A Farewell to Arms, published on the 27th of September 1929, drew on his Italian Front experiences. Biographer James Mellow believed it established Hemingway's stature as a major American writer. Before it was done, Hemingway received word while in New York that his father Clarence had killed himself. He had earlier written to his father telling him not to worry about money; the letter arrived minutes after the death. Hemingway told friends, "I'll probably go the same way."

  For Whom the Bell Tolls came out of the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway covered starting in March 1937, traveling with journalist Martha Gellhorn. He began writing the novel in March 1939 and finished it in July 1940, working across Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley. Published that October, it sold half a million copies within months and, as Meyers writes, "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation". He married Gellhorn on the 20th of November 1940, in Cheyenne, after his divorce from Pauline.

• 6. The Iceberg Theory

  ›

  The New York Times described Hemingway's prose in 1926 as "a lean, hard, athletic narrative" that put more elaborate literary English "to shame". When the Nobel committee awarded him the prize in 1954, it cited "his mastery of the art of narrative" and "the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style". What was the mechanism behind that influence?

  Hemingway called it the iceberg theory: facts float above water; the supporting structure operates out of sight. He explained the concept himself in "The Art of the Short Story": "If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless." About seventy percent of his sentences are simple sentences without subordination - a childlike grammar that carries a weight of implication the surface never states.

  Critic Zoe Trodd believed Hemingway crafted those skeletal sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had "used up words". The prose avoids internal punctuation - colons, semicolons, dashes - in favor of short declarative sentences that pile on one another. Conjunctions take the place of commas, a device called polysyndeton that creates a sense of relentless forward motion. The Spanish language shaped his prose too; critics Allen Josephs, Mimi Gladstein, and Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera have studied those Spanish-language influences, and Hemingway also used bilingual puns as stylistic devices.

  Many of his imitators mistook the surface simplicity for the whole. Saul Bellow satirized the style as "Do you have emotions? Strangle them." Hemingway's intent was the opposite: to portray emotion accurately. As he wrote in Death in the Afternoon, the "sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion" was what he was after - the kind of thing that would hold its truth "in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always".

• 7. Africa, the Nobel, and Decline

  ›

  In January 1954, while on a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo that Hemingway had chartered as a Christmas gift for his fourth wife Mary Welsh, the plane struck an abandoned utility pole and crashed. Hemingway sustained back and shoulder injuries; Mary broke ribs and went into shock. After spending a night in the brush, they chartered a boat and reached Butiaba, where a waiting pilot offered to fly them out. That plane exploded on takeoff. Mary and the pilot escaped through a broken window. Hemingway had to batter the door open with his head.

  They arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway's death. In the weeks that followed, Mary reported to friends the full inventory of his injuries: two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder, and a broken skull, with cerebral fluid leaking from the head wound. When the Nobel committee awarded him the prize in October 1954, he suspected to friends that his widely publicized near-death in Africa may have influenced the academy's timing. He was still recuperating and did not travel to Stockholm. He sent a speech instead, which included the line: "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life."

  After the crashes, he drank more heavily than usual. By 1960 he was, according to his friend A. E. Hotchner, "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused". He had grown paranoid, convinced the FBI was monitoring his movements in Ketchum. At the end of November 1960, his physician George Saviers flew him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota under the pretext of treating hypertension. He was checked in under Saviers's name. Hemingway underwent electroconvulsive therapy as many as fifteen times that December. To Hotchner he said of the treatment: "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient."

• 8. The Final Days and What Remains

  ›

  On the 21st of April 1961, Mary found Hemingway with a shotgun in the kitchen. He was sedated and admitted to Sun Valley Hospital, then flown back to the Mayo Clinic for three more electroshock treatments. He was released at the end of June and was home in Ketchum by June 30. Two days later, in the early morning hours of July 2, he shot himself with his favorite shotgun.

  Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961 - a hereditary condition in which iron accumulates in tissues and causes both mental and physical deterioration. His father may have had the same condition; his father had also died by suicide. So did his sister Ursula and his brother Leicester. Neuropsychiatrist Andrew Farah's 2017 book Hemingway's Brain argues that Hemingway also suffered from nine serious concussions accumulated over decades, which produced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, then dementia with Lewy bodies. Farah's reviewer Susan Beegel writes that his study "should put an end to future speculation".

  What the writer left behind is harder to measure than the cause of his death. His books were burned in Berlin in 1933 as "a monument of modern decadence". J. D. Salinger, who met him during World War II, wrote to Hemingway that their conversations had given him "his only hopeful minutes of the entire war" and jokingly named himself "national chairman of the Hemingway Fan Clubs". Mary Welsh established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965 and later donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library, where in 1980 a group of scholars gathered to assess them and formed the Hemingway Society, which still publishes The Hemingway Review. In 2002, a fossil billfish discovered in the Danata Formation of Turkmenistan was named Hemingwaya after him - a small, permanent tribute from the natural world he spent his life writing toward.