Author - Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway writing in Kenya,
Circa 1953
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Novels
- (1926)
The
Torrents of Spring
- (1926)
The Sun
Also Rises
- (1929)
A Farewell
to Arms
- (1937)
To Have
and Have Not
- (1940)
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
- (1950)
Across the
River and Into the
Trees
- (1952)
The Old
Man and the Sea
- (1970)
Islands in
the Stream
- (1986)
The Garden
of Eden
- (1999)
True at
First Light
- (2005)
Under
Kilimanjaro
Collections
- (1923)
Three
Stories and Ten
Poems
- (1925)
In Our
Time
- (1927)
Men
Without Women
- (1933)
Winner
Take Nothing
- (1936)
The Snows
of Kilimanjaro
- (1938)
The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine
Stories
- (1969)
The Fifth
Column and Four Stories of the Spanish
Civil War
- (1972)
The Nick
Adams Stories
- (1987)
The
Complete Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway
- (1995) Everyman's
Library: The Collected
Stories
|
Anthologies
- edited by
Hemingway
Nonfiction
- (1932)
Death in
the Afternoon
- (1935)
Green
Hills of
Africa
- (1962)
Hemingway,
The Wild Years
- (1964)
A Moveable
Feast
- (1967)
By-Line:
Ernest Hemingway
- (1970)
Ernest
Hemingway: Cub Reporter
- (1981)
Ernest
Hemingway Selected
Letters
- (1985)
The
Dangerous
Summer
- (1985)
Dateline:
Toronto
Stage
Plays[43]
- (1961)
A Short
Happy Life
- (1967)
The
Hemingway Hero (working title
was: Of Love and
Death)
|
Adaptations
Television
productions[43]
- (1958) Scouting on
Two Continents, by Frederick Russell Burnham (not
completed)
- (1959) For Whom the
Bell Tolls
- (1959) The
Killers (CBS Buick Electra Playhouse)
- (1960) The Fifth
Column
- (1960) The Snows of
Kilimanjaro
- (1960) The Gambler,
The Nun and the Radio
- (1960) After the
Storm (not completed)
U.S./UK Film
Adaptations
- (1932) A Farewell to Arms (starring Gary
Cooper)
- (1943) For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gary
Cooper/Ingrid Bergman)
- (1944) To Have and Have Not (Humphrey
Bogart/Lauren Bacall)
- (1946) The Killers (starring Burt
Lancaster)
- (1950) The Breaking Point
- (1952) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (starring
Gregory Peck)
- (1957) A Farewell to Arms (starring Rock
Hudson)
- (1957) The Sun Also Rises (starring Tyrone
Power)
- (1958) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Spencer
Tracy)
- (1962) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young
Man
- (1964) The Killers (starring Lee Marvin)
- (1965) For Whom the Bell Tolls
- (1977) Islands in the Stream (starring George C.
Scott)
- (1984) The Sun Also Rises
- (1990) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Anthony
Quinn)
- (1996) In Love and War (starring Chris
O'Donnell)
- (1999) The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway - Autograph and Signature Samples


Biography of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2,
1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and
journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in
Paris known as "the Lost Generation", as described in his
memoir A Moveable Feast. He received the Pulitzer Prize
in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by
economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his
literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence
on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His
protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal
described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now
considered canonical in American literature.
Early life

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak
Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first
son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds "Doctor
Ed" Hemingway, a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway.
Hemingway's father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn
on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife
had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom
Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather,
Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who
lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway's mother once aspired to an opera career and
earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was
domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict
Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had
"wide lawns and narrow minds".[1] His mother had wanted twins, and
when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his
sister Marcelline (eighteen months older) in similar
clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the
pretense of the two children being "twins." Some
biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further
"feminised" her son in his youth by calling him
"Ernestine", but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian
middle-class were often dressed as females.[2] Many themes in Hemingway's work
point to destructive interactions between male and
female sexual partners (cf. "Hills Like White
Elephants"), within marital unions (cf. Now I Lay
Me, The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber), and among most other combinations of
men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in
addition certain posthumously published pieces contain
ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, no
connection between Hemingway's depiction of these
human conditions and his own early childhood
experiences has been established.

Hemingway's birthplace
in Oak Park Illinois
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an
interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsman
hobbies of hunting, fishing and camping in the woods and lakes
of Northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere
on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing
there. These early experiences in close contact with nature
instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure
and for living in remote or isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School
from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled
both academically and athletically; he boxed, played football,
and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first
writing experience was writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the
school's
newspaper and yearbook, respectively) in his junior year,
then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote
under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary
hero Ring Lardner.[3]
After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college.
Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub
reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at
the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30,
1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the
Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing
style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use
vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."[4] In honor of the centennial year of
Hemingway's birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway
its top reporter of the last hundred years.
World War I

Ernest Hemingway in his
World War I uniform
Hemingway left his
reporting job after only a few months and, against his father's
wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in
World War I. He failed the medical examination due to poor
vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. On
his route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was
under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of
staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway
tried to get as close to combat as possible.
Soon after arriving on the Italian Front Hemingway witnessed
the brutalities of war. On his first day on duty, an ammunition
factory near Milan blew up. Hemingway had to pick up the human,
primarily female, remains. This first encounter with death left
him shaken.
The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror. One of
them, Eric Dorman-Smith, entertained Hemingway with a line from
Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care
not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go
which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the
next."[5] (Hemingway, for his part,
would quote this line in The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber, one of his famous short stories set
in Africa.) To another soldier, Hemingwayonce said, "You
are troppo vecchio (It. too old) for this
war, pop." The 50-year old soldier replied, "I can die as
well as any man."[5]
On 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies
to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver.
He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left
fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of
machine-gun fire. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of
Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian
government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety
in spite of his own injuries.
Hemingway worked in a Milan hospital run by the American Red
Cross. With very little in the way of entertainment, he often
drank heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. Here he met
Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses
attending groups of four patients each, who was more than six
years his senior. Hemingway fell in love with her, but their
relationship did not survive his return to the United States;
instead of following Hemingway to America, as originally
planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian
officer. This left an indelible mark on his psyche and provided
inspiration for, and was fictionalized in, one of his early
novels, A Farewell to Arms. Later in life, Hemingway
identified even more closely with the protagonist of that
novel, claiming (falsely) to have attained the rank of
Lieutenant in the Italian Army and to have fought in three
battles.
First novels and other early
works
Ernest Hemingway's apartment
in 1921 in Chicago, 1239 North Dearborn.
After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from
the United States in part due to prohibition, in 1920, he
moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as
The Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale
neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario.[6] During his stay, he found a job
with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a
freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent.
Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter
Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short
stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who
praised them as fine work. They would later be
reunited in Paris.
For a short time from late 1920 through most of 1921,
Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago, while still
filing stories for The Toronto Star. He also worked as
associate editor of the Co-operative Commonwealth, a
monthly journal. In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife,
Hadley Richardson. After the honeymoon they moved to a cramped
top floor apartment on the 1300 block of Clark
Street.[7] In September, he moved to a cramped
fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building
standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a then run-down
section of Chicago's near north side. The building still
stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "The
Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing,
but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak
Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad.
At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris,
France, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the
Toronto Star. After Hemingway's return to Paris,
Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein.
She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian
Modern Movement" then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this
was the beginning of the American expatriate circle that became
known as the "Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway
in the epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and
his memoir, A Moveable Feast. The epithet, "Lost
Generation" was reportedly appropriated by Miss Stein from her
French garage mechanic when he made the offhand comment that
hers was "une generation perdue". His other influential mentor
was Ezra Pound,[8] the founder of imagism. Hemingway
later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half
the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were
never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always
right."[9] The group often frequented Sylvia
Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de
l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American
banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses,
Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of
the novel into the United States (Hemingway writes of
meeting and talking with Joyce in Paris in A Moveable
Feast). His own first book, called Three Stories
and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert
McAlmon.
After much success as a foreign correspondent, Hemingway
returned to Toronto, Canada in 1923. During his second stint
living in Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He was named
John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, but would later be known as
Jack. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein to be Jack's
godmother.
Around the same time, Hemingway had a bitter falling out
with his editor, Harry Hindmarsh, who believed Hemingway had
been spoiled by his time overseas.[10] Hindmarsh gave Hemingway
mundane assignments, and Hemingway grew bitter and wrote
an angry resignation in December of 1923. However, his
resignation was either ignored or rescinded, and Hemingway
continued to write sporadically for The Toronto
Star through 1924.[11] Most of Hemingway's work for
the Star was later published in the 1985 collection
Dateline: Toronto.
Hemingway's American literary debut came with the
publication of the short story cycle In Our Time (1925).
The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the
American version were initially published in Europe as in
our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway,
reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted
by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the
collection's best-known story.
In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The
Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the
Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close
friends, often drinking and talking together. They frequently
exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to
advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first
collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled
and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, however,
disliked Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as
"bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque" and
asserting that his macho persona was a facade, she became
"convinced" that Ernest was homosexual and accused her husband
of having an affair with him.

La Closerie
des Lilas restaurant (seen here in
1909),
where Hemingway wrote parts of The Sun Also
Rises.
Hemingway's relationships in France provided inspiration
for Hemingway's first full-length novel, The Sun Also
Rises (1926). The novel was semi-autobiographical,
following a group of expatriate Americans around Paris and
Spain. The climactic scenes of the novel are set in
Pamplona, during the fiesta that the novel made famous
throughout Europe and the U.S. The novel was a success and
met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially
claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature,
he was apparently inspired to write it after reading
Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married
Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott,
Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter,
publishing in magazines such as Vanity Fair and
Vogue.[12] Hemingway converted to
Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the
publication of Men Without Women, a collection
of short stories, containing "The Killers", one of
Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories.
In 1928, Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to Key West,
Florida, to begin their new life together. However,
their new life was soon interrupted by yet another
tragic event in Hemingway's life.
In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with
diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using
an old Civil War pistol. This greatly hurt Hemingway and is
perhaps played out through Robert Jordan's father's suicide in
the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. He immediately
traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and stirred up
controversy by vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic
view, that suicides go to Hell. At about the same time, Harry
Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and a friend of
Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also committed suicide.

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer House, built in 1927.
In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born
in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the
couple a few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after
difficult labor, details of which were incorporated into the
concluding scene of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway lived
and wrote most of A Farewell to Arms plus several short
stories at Pauline's parents' house in Piggott, Arkansas. The
Pfeiffer House and Carriage House has since been converted into
a museum owned by Arkansas State University.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms recounts the
romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and
Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily
autobiographical: the plot was directly inspired by his
relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan; Catherine's
parturition was inspired by the intense labor pains of Pauline
in the birth of Patrick; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired
the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don
Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of
the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character
Rinaldi is obscure, he had already appeared in In Our
Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time
when many other World War I books were prominent, including
Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria
Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard
Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves'
Goodbye to All That. The success of A Farewell to
Arms made Hemingway financially independent.
Key West and the Spanish Civil
War
Ernest Hemingway House in Key
West, now a museum, and also home for a colony of
alleged descendents of Hemingway's famous polydactyl
cat
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway returned
to Key West, Florida in 1931, where he established his
first American home, which has since been converted to a
museum. From this 1851 solid limestone house — a wedding
present from Pauline's uncle — Hemingway fished in the
waters around the Dry Tortugas with his longtime friend
Waldo Pierce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and
occasionally traveled to Spain, gathering material for
Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take
Nothing. Over the next 9 years, until the end of this
marriage in 1940, and then in a second period throughout
the 1950s, Hemingway would do an estimated 70% of his
lifetime's writing in the writer's den in the upper floor
of the converted garage, in back of this house.
Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting,
was published in 1932. Hemingway had become an aficionado
after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in
The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the
Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the
metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost
religious practice. In his writings on Spain, he was
influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway
won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his
death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja
deserved the prize more than he).
A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi,
and Machakos in Kenya, moving on to Tanzania, where he hunted
in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara and west and southeast of
the present-day Tarangire National Park. 1935 saw the
publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his
safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of
his African experiences.
In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on
the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper
Alliance. While there, Hemingway broke his friendship with John
Dos Passos because, despite warnings, Dos Passos continued to
report on the atrocities of not only the fascist Nationalists
whom Hemingway disliked, but also those of the elected and
radicalized left-leaning Republicans whom he
favored.[13][14] In this context Hemingway's
colleague and associate Herbert Matthews, who would become
more well known for his favorable reports on Fidel Castro,
showed a similar bias for the Republican side as
Hemingway. Hemingway, who was a convert to Catholicism
during his marriage to his wife Pauline, began to question
his religion at this time, eventually leaving the church
(though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to
Catholicism for the rest of his life). The war also
strained Hemingway's marriage. Pauline Pfieffer was a
devout Catholic and, as such, sided with the fascist,
pro-Catholic regime of Franco, whereas Hemingway supported
the Republican government. During this time, Hemingway
wrote a little known essay, The Denunciation, which
would not be published until 1969 within a collection of
stories, the Fifth Column and Four Stories of the
Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical,
suggesting that Hemingway might have been an informant for
the Republic as well as a weapons instructor during the
war.[15]
Some health problems characterized this period of
Hemingway's life: an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash
in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids, kidney trouble
from fishing, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in
an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs,
and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming
forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.
The Forty-Nine
Stories
In 1938 — along with his only full-length play, titled
The Fifth Column — 49 stories were published in the
collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine
Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in
his foreword, to write more. Many of the stories that make up
this collection can be found in other abridged collections,
including In Our Time, Men Without Women,
Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of
Kilimanjaro.
Some of the collection's important stories include Old
Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills
Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The
Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean,
Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short,
the book also includes much longer stories, among them The
Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber.
For Whom the Bell
Tolls

Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the
Republicans, ending the Spanish Civil War in the spring of
1939. Hemingway lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascists,
and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to
his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce, Hemingway
married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn,
his third wife. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was
published in 1940. It was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West,
and was finished in July, 1940. The long work, which takes
place during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events
and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with
Spanish soldiers on the Republican side. It was largely based
upon Hemingway's experience of living in Spain and reporting on
the war. It is one of his most notable literary
accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate
paragraph of John Donne's Meditation XVII.
World War II and its
aftermath
The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941,
and for the first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take
part in naval warfare. Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship,
Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines
threatening shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United
States. After the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage, he
went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's
magazine. There Hemingway observed the D-Day landings from an
LCVP (landing craft), although he was not allowed to go ashore.
He later became angry that his wife, Martha Gellhorn — by then,
more a rival war correspondent than a wife — had managed to get
ashore in the early hours of June 7 dressed as a nurse, after
she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with
explosives. Hemingway acted as an unofficial liaison officer at
Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards formed his own partisan
group which, as he later wrote, took part in the liberation of
Paris. Although this claim has been challenged by many
historians, he was nevertheless unquestionably on the
scene.
After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of
Eden, which was never finished and would be published
posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he
planned a major trilogy which was to comprise "The Sea When
Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the
latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the
Sea). He spent time in a small Italian town called
Acciaroli (located approximately 136 km south of Naples). There
was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited
and stuck together as the posthumously-published novel
Islands in the Stream (1970).
Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four contentious years,
Hemingway married war correspondent Mary Welsh Hemingway, whom
he had met overseas in 1944. He returned to Cuba, and in 1945
at the Soviet Embassy became public witness to the Rolando
Masferrer schism within the Cuban communist party (García
Montes, and Alonso Ávila, 1970 p. 362).
Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls
was Across the River and into the Trees (1950), set in
post-World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last
words of American Civil War Confederate General Stonewall
Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich) at
the time, Hemingway wrote Across the River and into the
Trees as a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell
(based on his friend, then Colonel Charles Lanham) and the
young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" means "reborn"
in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of
which accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude,
and sentimentality; however this criticism was not shared by
all critics.
Later years
One section of the sea trilogy was published as The Old
Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success
satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him the Pulitzer
Prize in 1953. The next year he was awarded with the Nobel
Prize in Literature. Upon receiving the latter he noted that he
would have been "happy; happier...if the prize had been given
to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen", referring to Danish
writer Karen Blixen.[16] These awards helped to restore his
international reputation.

Aboard his yacht, the Pilar,
ca. mid 1950s
Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari,
he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes; he
sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave
concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye and the
hearing in his left ear, suffered paralysis of the spine, a
crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first
degree burns on his face, arms, and leg. Some American
newspapers mistakenly published his obituary, thinking he had
been killed.[17]
As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month
later in a bushfire accident, which left him with second degree
burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right
forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was
unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.
A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old
manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were
transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his
energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him
down. His blood pressure and cholesterol were perilously high,
he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression was
aggravated by his heavy drinking. However, in October of 1956,
Hemingway found the strength to travel to Madrid and act as a
pallbearer at Pío Baroja's burial. Baroja was one of
Hemingway's literary influences.
Following the revolution in Cuba and the ousting of General
Fulgencio Batista in 1959, expropriations of foreign owned
property led many Americans to return to the United States.
Hemingway chose to stay a little longer. It is commonly said
that he shared good relations with Fidel Castro and declared
his support for the revolution, and he is quoted as wishing
Castro "all luck" with running the country.[18][19] However, the Hemingway account
"The Shot"[20] is used by Cabrera
Infante[21] and others[22][23] as evidence of conflict between
Hemingway and Fidel Castro dating back to 1948 and the
killing of "Manolo" Castro, a friend of
Hemingway.[24] Hemingway came under surveillance
by the FBI both during World War II and afterwards (most
probably because of his long association with marxist
Spanish Civil War veterans[25] who were again active in Cuba) for
his residence and activities in Cuba.[19] In 1960, he left the island and
Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, that he owned for
over twenty years. The official Cuban government account
is that it was left to the Cuban government, which has
made it into a museum devoted to the author.[26] In 2001, Cuba's state-owned
tourism conglomerate, El Gran-Caribe SA, began licensing
the La Bodeguita del Medio international restaurant chain
relying largely on the original Havana restaurant's
association with Hemingway, a frequent visitor.[27].
In February of 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his
bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the
publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend,
Life Magazine bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris
and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Lang to let him print
the manuscript, along with a picture layout, before it came out
in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, the
proposal was agreed upon. The first part of the story appeared
in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960, with the
remaining installments being printed in successive issues.
Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The
Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in
Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems — and
also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and
continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to
precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered
significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He
also lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at
170 pounds (77 kg, 12st 2lb).
Suicide
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and
received ECT treatment again. Some three weeks short of his
62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2,
1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the
head. Judged not mentally responsible for his final act, he was
buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed
the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by
destroying his memory; some medical and scholarly opinion has
been receptive to this view, although others, including one of
the physicians who prescribed the electroshock regimen, dispute
that opinion.
Hemingway is believed to have purchased the weapon he used
to commit suicide at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then an
elite excursion goods retailer and firearm supplier. (The
Shotgun was a Boss & Co ordered through
A&F)[28] In a particularly gruesome
suicide, he rested the gun butt of the double-barreled
shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over
it to put the twin muzzles to his forehead just above the
eyes, and pulled both triggers.[29] The coroner, at request of the
family, did not do an autopsy.[30]
Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed
suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings
Ursula and Leicester, and possibly his granddaughter Margaux
Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's
paternal line had a hereditary disease known as
haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in
the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes
depression or instability in the cerebrum.[31] Hemingway's physician
father is known to have developed haemochromatosis (bronze
diabetes) in the years prior to his suicide at age
fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a
heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later
years.
Hemingway suffered from manic depression, now known as
bipolar disorder, and was subsequently treated with
electroshock therapy at Menninger Clinic.[32] He later credited this to his
self-proclaimed memory loss which he cited as a reason for
not wanting to live.[32]
Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum,
Idaho, at the north end of town. A memorial was erected in
1966. It is inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a friend, Gene
Van Guilder:
Best of all he loved the fall The leaves yellow 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 Ernest Hemingway - Idaho - 1939
Celebrating Hemingway's love for Idaho and the frontier, The
Ernest Hemingway Festival [2] takes place annually in Ketchum
and Sun Valley in late September with scholars, a reading by
the PEN/Hemingway Award winner and many more events, including
historical tours, open mic nights and a sponsored dinner at
Hemingway's home in Warm Springs now maintained by the Nature
Conservancy in Ketchum.
Posthumous
publications
Hemingway was a prolific letter writer and, in 1981, many of
these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway
Selected Letters. It was met with some controversy as
Hemingway himself stated he never wished to publish his
letters. Further letters were published in a book of his
correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing
that Counts [1996].
A long-term project is now underway to publish the thousands
of letters Hemingway wrote during his lifetime. The project is
being undertaken as a joint venture by Penn State University
and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Sandra Spanier, Professor
of English and wife of Penn State president Graham Spanier, is
serving as general editor of the collection.[3]
Hemingway was still writing up to his death. All of the
unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been
published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast,
Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories
(portions of which were previously unpublished), The
Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of
Eden.[33] In a note forwarding "Islands in
the Stream", Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with
Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for
publication from Ernest's original manuscript". She also
stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting
spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the
manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made
them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added
nothing to it." Some controversy has surrounded the
publication of these works, insofar as it has been
suggested that it is not necessarily within the
jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to
determine whether these works should be made available to
the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly
note that the version of The Garden of Eden
published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no
way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless
omits two-thirds of the original manuscript.[34]
The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972.
What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of
Hemingway's short stories was published as The Complete
Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and
published in 1987. As well, in 1969 The Fifth Column and
Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War was published. It
contains Hemingway's only full length play, The Fifth
Column, which was previously published along with the
First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938, along with four
unpublished works written about Hemingway's experiences during
the Spanish Civil War.
In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light
appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was
heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway. Six years later,
Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and considerably longer
version of True at First Light appeared. In either
edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final
African safari in 1953 – 1954. He spent several months in Kenya
with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane
crashes.[35] Anticipation of the novel, whose
manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an
unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is
proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a
new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to
his canonical, macho image[36]), even as editors Robert W. Lewis
of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of
University of New Mexico have pushed it through to
publication; the novel was published on September 15
2005.
Also published posthumously were several collections of his
work as a journalist. These contain his columns and articles
for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance,
and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest
Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The
Wild Years edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. Finally, a
collection of introductions, forwards, public letters and other
miscellanea was published as Hemingway and the Mechanism of
Fame in 2005.
Influence and legacy
The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature
was considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of
Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in
much modern fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from
Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more
consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time,
Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary
circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one
of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard
boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the
1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. During World War
II, J. D. Salinger met and corresponded with Hemingway, whom he
acknowledged as an influence.[37] In one letter to Hemingway,
Salinger wrote that their talks "had given him his only
hopeful minutes of the entire war," and jokingly "named
himself national chairman of the Hemingway Fan
Clubs."[38] Hunter S. Thompson often
compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque
sentences can be found in his early novel, The Rum
Diary. Thompson's later suicide by gunshot to the head
mirrored Hemingway's. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick
stood up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired
Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and
many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also
influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers.
Hemingway also provided a role model to fellow author and
hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as "the
poor man's Ernest Hemingway". In Latin American
literature, Hemingway's impact can be seen in the work of
fellow Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Beyond
the more formal literature authors, popular novelist
Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime
genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence
and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though
he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say,
"I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that
I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take
myself or anything as seriously as he did."
Family
Parents
- Clarence Hemingway. Born September 4, 1871, died
December 6, 1928
- Grace Hall Hemingway. Born June 15, 1872, died June 28,
1951
Siblings
- Marcelline Hemingway. Born January 15, 1898, died
December 9, 1963
- Ursula Hemingway. Born April 29, 1902, died October 30,
1966
- Madelaine Hemingway. Born November 28, 1904, died
January 14, 1995
- Carol Hemingway. Born July 19, 1911, died October 27,
2002
- Leicester Hemingway. Born April 1, 1915, died September
13, 1982
Wives and children
- Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Married September 3, 1921,
divorced April 4, 1927.
-
Son, John Hadley Nicanor "Jack" Hemingway (aka Bumby).
Born October 10, 1923, died December 1, 2000.
- Granddaughter, Joan (Muffet) Hemingway
- Granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway
- Granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway
- Pauline Pfeiffer. Married May 10, 1927, divorced
November 4, 1940.
- Son, Patrick. Born June 28, 1928.
-
Son, Gregory Hemingway (called 'Gig' by Hemingway;
later called himself 'Gloria'). Born November 12, 1931,
died October 1, 2001.
- Grandchildren, Patrick, Edward, Sean, Brendan,
Vanessa, Maria, John and Lorian Hemingway
- Martha Gellhorn. Married November 21, 1940, divorced
December 21, 1945.
- Mary Welsh. Married March 14, 1946.
- On 19 August 1946, she miscarried due to ectopic
pregnancy.
Awards and honors
During his lifetime Hemingway was awarded with:
- Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in
World War I
- Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in
World War II) in 1947
- Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the
Sea)
- Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (for his lifetime
literary achievements)
A minor planet 3656 Hemingway, discovered by Soviet
astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1978 is named after
him.[39]
Tributes and
portrayals
- In 1999, Michael Palin retraced the footsteps of
Hemingway, in Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a
BBC television documentary, one hundred years after the
birth of his favorite writer. The journey took him through
many sites including Chicago, Paris, Italy, Africa, Key
West, Cuba, and Idaho. Together with photographer Basil
Pao, Palin also created a book version of the trip. The
text of the book is available for free on Palin's
website.
- Since 1987, actor-writer Ed Metzger has portrayed the
life of Ernest Hemingway in his one-man stage show,
Hemingway: On The Edge, featuring stories and
anecdotes from Hemingway's own life and adventures. Metzger
quotes Hemingway, "My father told me never kill anything
you're not going to eat. At the age of 9, I shot a
porcupine. It was the toughest lesson I ever had." More
information about the show is available at his website
- Hemingway's World War II experiences in Cuba have been
novelized by Dan Simmons as a spy thriller, The Crook
Factory.
- Hemingway, played by Jay Underwood, was a recurring
character in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In
one episode, set in Northern Italy in 1916, Hemingway the
ambulance driver gives young Indy (Sean Patrick Flanery)
advice about women -- only to discover that he and Indy are
rivals for the heart of the same woman. (The episode shows
Indy unwittingly influencing Hemingway's future writing, by
reciting the Elizabethan poem, A Farewell to Arms by
George Peele.) In another episode, set in Chicago in 1920,
Hemingway the newspaper reporter helps Indy and a young
Eliot Ness in their investigation of the murder of gangster
James Colosimo.
- The 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest
Hemingway, about the friendship of two retired men, one
Irish, one Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred
Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra
Bullock, and Piper Laurie.
- The 1996 motion picture In Love and War, based
on the book Hemingway in Love and War by Henry S.
Villard and James Nagel, is the story of the young reporter
Ernest Hemingway (played by Chris O'Donnell) as an
ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. While bravely
risking his life in the line of duty, he is injured and
ends up in the hospital, where he falls in love with his
nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky (Sandra Bullock).
Anecdotes
- In a boxing match with friend and writer Morley
Callaghan, Hemingway's lip was cut. Hemingway spit blood
into Callaghan's face and said: "The bullfighters do that
when they are injured, it is how they show contempt."
- In a letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway describes why
bulls are better than literary critics: "Bulls don't run
reviews. Bulls of 25 don't marry old women of 55 and expect
to be invited to dinner. Bulls do not get you cited as
co-respondent in Society divorce trials. Bulls don't borrow
money. Bulls are edible after they have been
killed."[40]
- According to various biographical sources, Hemingway
was six feet tall and weighed anywhere between 170 and 260
pounds at varying times in his life. His build was
muscular, though he became paunchy in his middle years. He
had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and habitually wore a
mustache (with an occasional beard) from the age of 23 on.
By age 50, he consistently wore a graying beard. He had a
scar on his forehead, the result of a drunken accident in
Paris in his late 20s (thinking he was flushing a toilet,
he accidentally pulled a skylight down on his head). He
suffered from myopia all his life, but vanity prevented him
from being fitted with glasses until he was 32 (and very
rarely was he photographed wearing them). He was fond of
tennis and boxing, fonder of fishing and hunting, and hated
New York City.
- Though Hemingway did not have a favorable opinion of
his hometown of Oak Park, IL, describing it as a town of
"Wide yards and narrow minds," the town has adopted a
favorable opinion about him. Today a Hemingway Museum
exists in that town. Every summer a Hemingway festival is
staged in that city, complete with a "running of the
bulls", using a fake bull on wheels. This festival also
features readings of the author's work and Spanish
food.
- The original short short story. In the 1920s,
Hemingway bet his colleagues $10 that he could write a
complete story in just six words. They paid up. His story:
"For sale: Baby shoes, Never worn."[41] In a contest in Wired magazine
inspired by Hemingway's story, 33 authors recently
submitted 6-word efforts.[42]
Notes
- From Childhood at The Hemingway
Resource Center.
- Two different sources disagree on how
long this habit of his mother's lasted. A note from a
PBS lecture series states that this habit lasted for
two years; Grauer claims she stopped when he was
6.
- "Lardner Connections". Retrieved on
2007-03-22.
- Many such anecdotes are compiled at
the centennial commemoration page of the Kansas City
Star.
- Burgess, 1978, p. 24.
- National Post article on Toronto's
Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood
- Brown, Alan, "Literary Landmarks of
Chicago," 2004, Starhill Press, ISBN
0-913515-50-7.
- On August 10, 1943, Hemingway typed
a letter to Archibald MacLeish discussing
Pound's mental health and other literary matters.
- In a conversation with John Peale
Bishop, quoted in Hemingway, Cowley, ed, 1944, p.
xiii.
- Dateline: Toronto,
Foreword, pp xxv-xxvii, Charles Scribner Jr.
- "Hem and The Star: Parting was
inevitable", The Toronto Star, 1986-02-02.
- Hemingway Resource Center
- The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos
Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen
Koch, published 2005 ISBN
- The Spanish Civil War (1961)
by Hugh Thomas
- The Spanish Civil War (1961)
by Hugh Thomas
- From The New York Times Book
Review, November 7, 1954.
- Ernest Hemingway Quick Facts.
encarta.
- Hemingway's Marriage to Mary Welsh.
His last days..
- Homing To The Stream :Ernest
Hemingway In Cuba.
- Hemingway, Ernest 1951 The Shot. True
the men’s magazine. April 1951. pp. 25-28
- An Interview with Guillermo Cabrera
Infante.
- Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto 1980 The
Dictatorship of Rhetoric/the Rhetoric of Dictatorship:
Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, and Roa Bastos. Latin
American Research Review, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1980), pp.
205-228 "For example, the assassination of Manolo
Castro is retold by alluding to Hemingway's "The
Shot,…""
- Castro-Hemingway-not-friends
- Raimundo, Daniel Efrain 1994 Habla el
Coronel Orlando Piedra (Coleccion Cuba y sus Jueces),
Ediciones Universal ISBN-10 ISBN-13: Pages 93-94 refer
to the death of Manolo Castro, and offers the insight
that it was Rolando Masferrer’s men who, rather than
the police who, were chasing after Fidel Castro with
lethal intent. According to this account Castro is
captured in the company of a woman and child as he
tries to flee to Venezuela via the Cuban airport of
Rancho Boyeros south of Havana by the Cuban Bureau of
Investigation as witnessed by sergeant of that
organization Joaquin Tasas. Castro is released the next
day. This matter is a little odd since Fidel Castro was
believed to have organized the death of Manolo Castro
(p. 99). This version is a close fit the scenario
described in "The Shot/."
- The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos
Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch,
published 2005 ISBN
- Finca Vigia
- MILLMAN, JOEL (February 22, 2007).
Hemingway's Ties to Bar - Still Move the Mojitos. Wall
Street Journal. Retrieved on 2007-06-01.
- Grauer, Neil A. "Remembering Papa."
Cigar Aficionado, July/August 1999.
- The Last Ole
- WAIS - World Affairs Report - Ernest
Hemingway
- (Wagner-Martin, 2000) p.43
describes his condition in August 1947 as including
high blood pressure, diabetes, depression and possible
haemochromatosis.
- Biography for Ernest Hemingway.
imdb. Amazon (June 2005). Retrieved on
2007-11-26.
- Information about these posthumous
Hemingway works was taken from Charles Scribner, Jr.'s
1987 Preface to The Garden of Eden.
- BookRags makes this quantitative
note; it also reveals some more information about the
publication of The Garden of Eden and offers
some discussion of thematic content.
- The Kent State University Press is
the official source for this new novel's release.
- See the University of North Dakota
feature of editor Robert W. Lewis, for example.
- Lamb, Robert Paul. "Hemingway and the
creation of twentieth-century dialogue - American
author Ernest Hemingway" (reprint), Twentieth Century
Literature, Winter 1996. Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
- Baker, Carlos (1969).
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons. ISBN
0-020-01690-5.
p. 420, 646.
- Schmadel, Lutz D.
(2003). Dictionary of Minor Planet Names,
5th, New York: Springer Verlag, p. 307. ISBN
3540002383.
- [1]
- Arthur C. Clarke, "Greetings,
Carbon-Based Bipeds, Collected Essays", 1999, p.
354.
- Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories
- Hemingway, Ernest; A.
E. Hotchner (2005). Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The
Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway And A. E.
Hotchner. Columbia, Missouri: University of
Missouri Press. ISBN 0826216056.
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