The Life of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21^st, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a physician, which earned him a lot of prestige as a child. It helped him learn about music, and art while growing up in a clean safe neighborhood. He went to Oak Park and River Forest High School. While there, he participated in a number of sports such as boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He excelled in his English classes and his junior year he took journalism classes. The kids with the best articles had their pieces submitted to the The Trapeze. Hemingway’s first piece was published in this paper; it was about the local performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. After high school, Hemingway went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Even though he was only there for six months, he relied on the Star’s style as a foundation for his writings. He drove ambulances during WWI until he was wounded. After returning home from the war, Hemingway found the inspiration to write “Big Two-Hearted River.” Hemingway married four times and had 3 boys.

            In 1921, after marrying his first wife, Hadley, the Hemingway’s moved to Paris to be a correspondent for the Toronto Star to cover the Greco-Turkish War. In 1923, his first book, three stories and ten poems were published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. Hemingway wrote the entire novel “The Sun Also Rises” in just six weeks on the terrace of his favorite restaurant, the La Closerie des Lilas. His original manuscript for “A Farewell to Arms” was stolen, but this proved to be a good thing. Because he had to re-write the novel, he had tome to reconsider his previous writing and improved it. He stripped away all the decorations and made it just matter-of-factly, concentrated and compressed. Hemingway published “A Farewell to Arms” in 1929 when other WWI books were being published. At this time, he was already married to his second wife, Pauline, and had a second son named Patrick. Almost all the characters in the novel are based off someone Hemingway knew in real life. While it wasn’t a war novel, the main theme was of life and death. After the success of “A Farewell to Arms”, Hemingway went on a safari in 1932, many animals died and The Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the literary results.

            In 1939, the woman who would become his third wife, Martha, inspired him to write his most famous novel ever, “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” He wrote about the happenings in the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In 1940, after divorcing Pauline, Hemingway and Martha married. In 1941, when Martha was sent to China on an assignment, he went with her. Later, during WWII, he participated in D-day but he didn’t leave the boat because the crew thought him to be too precious cargo. After the war, he married Mary; after her ectopic pregnancy, they suffered many injuries and accidents as well as health issues. Hemingway had a platonic love affair with a 19-year-old named Adriana Ivancich. She inspired him to write the novel “Across the River and Into the Trees.” It received generally negative reviews and the following year he sat down and wrote the draft for “The Old Man and the Sea” in eight weeks. This made him an international celebrity. During his final years, Hemingway’s behavior was like that of his father’s before he too committed suicide. Its believed that he suffered from hemochromatosis which is the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. In the end, he committed suicide on July 2^nd, 1961.