A Short Ernest Hemingway Biography
By Angelina Hanson
Instead of attending college, Hemingway decided to move to Kansas City, and in 1917, got a job as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. At the train station, his father wept and kissed his son goodbye. Hemingway wrote about this moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Working for The Star, Ernest was introduced to news writing, which demands brief and to the point sentences. He later adapted this writing style to his fiction.
Because he could not join the army due to a defective left eye (inhereted from his mother), in May of 1918, Hemingway became an honorary second lieutenant in the Red Cross. On his first day of service in World War I, he and other ambulance drivers were assigned to the shocking duty of picking up body parts from an exploded munitions factory. He soon recovered from this and became known as the man who was always where the action was. He often would sneak cigarettes and chocolate to the soldiers on the Italian front. It was on one of these missions on July 8th that he was severely wounded by an Austrian trench mortar. With over a hundred pieces of shrapnel and a machine gun bullet in his leg, he managed to carry a wounded soldier a hundred yards to safety. He received the Italian Medal of Valor for this.
Hemingway spent his recovery time at the Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana (an American hospital) in Milan. It was there that he fell in love with a nurse named Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky, but she was not willing to have a relationship with Hemingway, who was eight years her junior. His stay in Italy became the mold for A Farewell to Arms.
After his stay in the hospital, Hemigway was relieved of duty. With no reason to stay in Europe, he returned to America, and in 1920, moved to Chicago. He lived by writing for the Toronto Star and working as a sparing partner for boxers. In Chicago he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. In 1921 they were married and moved to Paris, France. Hemingway convinced the Toronto Star to allow him to work as a correspondent on the Greco-Turkish War. The couple also received money from Hadley’s trust fund, while Ernest continued working as a sparing partner.
In Paris, Hemingway met many of the greats: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox, and John Dos Passos. Stein took him under her wing and pointed him in the direction of the "simple declarative sentence."
It was also at this time in his life that Hemingway discovered bullfighting. He would later write several books and short stories about bullfighting. Among these were "Death in the Afternoon" and "The Dangerous Summer". With no real publications in Paris, Hemingway decided to return to America, but instead he and Hadley moved to Toronto, Canada. In 1923, his son, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, was born. Hemingway received publication of "In Our Time" in Paris shortly after, and, in 1924, decided to return.
In 1926, Hemingway published "The Torrents of Spring" and "The Sun also Rises". While his writing career was beginning, his marriage was ending. During his last few years in Paris he became very moody and unfaithful to Hadley. In 1927, Pauline Pfeiffer professed her love for Ernest and he returned it. Hadley did not believe that he truly loved Pauline and proposed a deal. If Ernest still loved Pauline after a hundred days separation, she would consent to divorce. Pauline returned to America, and Ernest stayed in Paris alone. Out of guilt, he arranged for Hadley to receive all the royalties from "The Sun also Rises". After a hundred days, the divorce was granted.
After the divorce, Hemingway published "Men Without Women". His luck was running bad and his health was declining, so when he finally married Pauline in 1928, he was happy to return to America. He would later write about the events in Paris in A Moveable Feast.
Ernest and Pauline temporarily settled in Kanas City, where Patrick Hemingway was born. During Pauline’s difficult labor, Hemingway was working on "A Farewell to Arms", and wrote about the moment in the ending. Soon after Patrick’s birth they moved to Key West, Florida. It was there that Ernest discovered the world of deep sea fishing. Even during these happy times, tragedy seemed to find him. His father had been struggling with diabetes and angina pectoris, and in 1929, shot himself in the head. Hemingway was very ashamed of his father’s suicide, and turned his back on him. This year also marked the release of "A Farewell to Arms", which was an immediate success. With his new acceptance he became arrogant.
Hemingway finished "Death in the Afternoon" in 1931. Pauline gave birth to another boy, Gregory, and they set off for Africa. While there he hunted lions, actually killing one. At first he was proud, but after looking at the lion lying on the ground, he soon felt guilt. Suffering from amebic dysentery and a prolapse of the lower intestine, he returned to America. On the ship Ile de France he met Marlene Dietrich, with whom he shared a long and complex relationship. Three stories resulted from his trip to Africa: "The Green Hills of Africa", "The Snows of Kilamanjaro", and "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber".
The Spanish Civil War became official in July, 1936, and Hemingway was offered a liaison’s job there by the North American Newspaper Alliance. In 1937, Hemingway also managed to publish "To Have and Have Not" while working as a correspondent. While he was there, he met Martha Gellhorn, who was working as a correspondent in Madrid for Collier’s. He had met her shortly in Key West before the war. She was beautiful, well-educated, and also a writer. Hemingway soon fell in love with her.
Pauline tried desperately to save their marriage, but in 1940, after the end of the Spanish Civil War, their long divorce came to an end, Hemingway married Martha, and then he published For "Whom the Bell Tolls". Having left the house in Key West to Pauline, Heminway purchased La Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. Martha was covering the second world war in Europe and eventually convinced Ernest to sign on as a correspondent for Collier’s and join her.
After the war was over, Ernest and Martha stayed in Europe. One night, when returning drunk from a party, Hemingway had a severe car accident and was hospitalized with severe head trauma. Martha went to visit him, and instead of comforting him, she laughed at his sad state. That was the end of the marriage. Martha Gellhorn divorced Ernest in 1945, and he had already fallen for another journalist named Mary Welsh. In 1946, they were married and returned to his home in Cuba.
Unable to find peace in Cuba, Ernest and Mary left for Venice. Is was there that he found his new muse, nineteen-year-old Adriana Ivancich. From her Hemingway created Renata, the heroin of Across the River and into the Trees. This was published in 1950, and he began work on "The Old Man and the Sea". His mother died a year later (which did not upset him at all), and another year after that, "The Old Man and the Sea" was published. For this he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize.
Just before the Nobel Prize in 1954, Ernest and Mary left for his fifth African safari, but it ended badly with two plane crashes. The first was not too serious, but the second had distraught Hemingway quite badly. He had a concussion, paralysis of the sphincter, first degree burns on his face, a sprained right arm and shoulder, a crushed vertebra, and a ruptured liver, kidney, and spleen. He was in continuous pain for a while.
The summer of 1959 was a high time for Hemingway. He travelled extensively through Europe, reminiscing, ending it with a prolonged stay in Spain, where he began work on "The Dangerous Summer", another look at the bullfight. After returning home, Hemingway was forced to leave his home in Cuba. Seeking a place to relax and finish work on "The Dangerous Summer", Ernest and Mary moved to Ketchum, Idaho in 1960.
Hemingway’s eyes were beginning to fail him and if he did manage to put down words, they were often incoherent. Slowly Ernest degenrated physically and psychologically. He began working irregularly and spending long evenings staring at nothing. He refused to hunt and ate little. Even while still living in Cuba, Hemingway began to show signs of paranoia and delusion. It soon became evident that psychiatric help would be necessary. Those around him managed to convince him to institutionalize himself, telling him that the treatment was for his high blood pressure (something he had been wary of). On November 30th, 1960, Hemingway was committed to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was given electroshock therapy.
Hemingway was released in January of 1961. He seemed well again and returned to work on "The Dangerous Summer". On April 18th he called A.E. Hotchner and told him that he could not finish the book. Then on April 23rd, Ernest Heminway tried to shoot himself in the head. The details of events after the 23rd are very vague, but on July 2nd, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide.
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