Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Litrary critics considered many of his works as classics of American literature.

Ernest Hemingway Early Life

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician.

The family eventually moved into a seven-bedroom home in a respectable neighborhood with a music studio for Grace and a medical office for Clarence.

Hemingway’s father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan as a young boy. These early experiences in nature instilled a passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.

From 1913 until 1917, Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School. He took part in a number of sports such as boxing, track and field, water polo, and football.

Ernest Hemingway Reporter

After leaving high school he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the Star‘s style guide as a foundation for his writing.

Hemingway was enthusiastic about his work but, after seven months, he volunteered as a Red Cross driver and sailed for Europe in 1918. 

His affair with an American nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, gave basis for the novel, A farewell to arms (1929). 

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway

The tragic love story of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war was filmed first time in 1932..

After the World War I, Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, where he married the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson.

In 1922, he went to Greece and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923, Hemingway made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona’s annual festival. 

Ernest Hemingway Writing Career

His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.

He divorced his wife in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer who was a Catholic, so he converted into a Catholic. 

They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been a journalist.

They moved to Key West in Florida in 1928, the same year that his father, tormented by illness and financial problems, committed suicide. He published the novel Farewell to Arms in 1929. 

During the Second World War, he was a war correspondent for seven months. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. 

They separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present with the troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

In 1951, Ernest Hemingway published short novel The Old Man and the Sea in Cuba, and published in 1952.

In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

Ernest Hemingway Style

Due to his strong action plots and spare, visually exact prose. Movie maker made many screen adaptations of his work, including: A Farewell to Arms (1933); To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958). 

His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his bias for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories. 

Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society. He gradually lost hope and faith in this confrontation. 

Ernest Hemingway Death

During 1960–61, he disintegrated physically. Hemingway had high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney and liver disease. He took drugs that made him even more depressed. 

Later his family took him to Mayo Clinic where doctor treated him with electric shock treatment that exacerbated his mental illness. 

On release from hospital on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself with his favourite shotgun in the head one morning in the hallway of his home in Ketchum, Idaho. 

Publishing house published several of Hemingway’s novels published posthumously. True at First Light, depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. Its staggering language and self-pity reveal mostly the downfall of his famous style.

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