Ernest Hemingway facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway in 1950
Born	(1899-07-21)July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois, United States
Died	July 2, 1961(1961-07-02) (aged 61) Ketchum, Idaho, United States
Nationality	American
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)
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Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American writer. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. After high school, he spent six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918. In 1921, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. In 1928, Hemingway returned to the U.S., where he settled in Key West, Florida. His experiences during the war supplied material for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.

In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, written in Havana, Cuba. During World War II, Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. In 1952, his novel The Old Man and the Sea was published to considerable acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. On a 1954 trip to Africa, Hemingway was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life.

Early life and education

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His parentes were Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. They were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park. Ernest was the second child in a family of six.

Each summer, the family travelled to their holiday home in northern Michigan. Ernest's father taught him how to catch fish, hunt, set up a camp, and cook over a fire.

Hemingway went to Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park between 1913 and 1917, where he competed in boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline, and received good grades in English classes. During his last two years at high school he edited the school's newspaper and yearbook (the Trapeze and Tabula). He tried to write like a famous sports writer, Ring Lardner.

Start as a news reporter

Hemingway recuperates from wounds in Milan, 1918

In 1917, Hemingway decided not to go to a university. The United States had just entered World War I and he wanted to join the Army, but they rejected him because his eyesight was not good enough.

Ernest found a job with the Kansas City Star newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri. Although he stayed there only for six months, the Star's style guide, which stated "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative", became a foundation for his prose.

Europe

Hemingway worked for the newspaper for nine months. He then joined the Red Cross to help on the battlefields of Europe. His job was to drive an ambulance and to take wounded soldiers off the battlefield.

The Red Cross sent him to Italy. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers. A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave. On July 8, 1918, right after bringing chocolate and cigarettes from the canteen to the men at the front line, the group came under mortar fire. Hemingway was seriously wounded. Despite his wounds, he assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he was decorated with the Italian War Merit Cross, the Croce al Merito di Guerra. He was only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "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 sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan. He spent six months at the hospital

When the war ended in 1919, Hemingway returned to the United States. His return home was a difficult time of readjustment. A family friend offered Hemingway a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, Ernest accepted. Late that year, he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. Hemingway returned to Michigan the next June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920.

Chicago

In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson. Anderson was one of the first American writers to write about common people. Hemingway saw that Anderson's stories showed life as it really was. This was similar to what he wanted to do.

Anderson gave Hemingway advice about his writing. He told Hemingway to move to Paris. Life was less costly there. Anderson said that Paris had many young artists and writers from many nations.

In Paris

Ernest and Hadley, 1922

Hemingway decided to move to Paris. Before he did, in America, he married a woman he had recently met. Her name was Hadley Richardson.

Paris was cold and grey when Hemingway and his new wife arrived in 1921. They lived in one of the poorest parts of the city. Their rooms were small and they did not have water from pipes. But the Toronto Star employed him as its European reporter, so they had enough money for the two of them to live. That job gave Hemingway time to write his stories.

Hemingway enjoyed exploring Paris, learning French customs, and meeting friends. Some of these new friends were artists and writers who had come to the city in the 1920s. Among them were poet, Ezra Pound, and writers Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Seeing that Hemingway was a good writer, they helped him publish his stories in the United States.

Hemingway travelled all over Europe. He wrote about politics, peace conferences, and border disputes, as well as sports, skiing, and fishing. Later he would write about bullfighting in Spain. The Toronto Star was pleased with his work, and wanted more of his reports, but Hemingway was busy with his own writing.

He said this: "Sometimes, I would start a new story and could not get it going. Then I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think. I would say to myself: 'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally, I would write a true sentence and go on from there. It was a wonderful feeling when I had worked well."

During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star newspaper. Almost all his fiction and short stories were lost, when in December 1922 as she was traveling to join him in Geneva, Hadley lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the train station Gare de Lyon. Hemingway was devastated and furious. Nine months later the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris.

First success in 1925

Hemingway, Hadley, and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into an apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time, was published in 1925. One of its stories, "Big Two Hearted River," told of the effects of war on a young man who was taking a long fishing trip in Michigan. Hemingway had learned from his father, when he was a boy, about living in the wild.

The story is about two kinds of rivers. One is calm and clear, and is where the young man fishes. The other is a dark, threatening swamp. The story shows its main character trying to forget his past, as well as the war. He does not talk much about the war. The reader learns about the young man, not because Hemingway tells his readers what the man thinks, but because he shows that man learning about himself. Many people believe it is one of the best modern American stories of all time. Because of this, "Big Two Hearted River" is often published in collections of best writing.

The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway was working on a long story. He wanted to publish a novel, so he would be recognized as a serious writer. And he wanted the money a novel would earn.

The novel was called The Sun Also Rises. It is about young Americans in Europe after World War One. The war had destroyed their dreams and had given them nothing to replace those dreams. The writer Gertrude Stein later called these people members of "The Lost Generation."

The book was an immediate success. At the age of 25 Ernest Hemingway was famous.

Marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer

Hemingway with his wife, Pauline in Paris, 1927

With the success of his novel, Hemingway became even more popular in Paris. Many people came to see him. One was an American woman, Pauline Pfeiffer. She became Hadley's friend. Then Pauline fell in love with Hemingway.

Hemingway and Pauline saw each other secretly. One time, they went away together on a short trip. Years later, Hemingway wrote about returning home after that trip:

"When I saw Hadley again, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling and the sun was on her lovely face. "

But their marriage was over. Ernest Hemingway and Hadley separated. She kept their son. He agreed to give her money he earned from his books.

In later years, he looked back at his marriage to Hadley as the happiest time of his life.

At twenty-five, Hemingway was living in Paris. He was a famous writer. But the end of his first marriage made him want to leave the place where he had first become famous.

Much later he said, "the city was never to be the same again. When I returned to it, I found it had changed as I had changed. Paris was never the same as when I was poor and very happy."

Hemingway and his new wife returned to the United States in 1928. Their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928.

Soon afterwards, Hemingway heard that his father had died. The news had a profound impact on Hemingway. He said, "My father taught me so much. He was the only one I really cared about."

The family settled in Key West, Florida, where they lived between 1931 and 1939. Before leaving Paris, Hemingway sent a collection of his stories to New York to be published. The book of stories, called Men Without Women, was published in October 1927.

Hemingway's third child, Gloria Hemingway, was born on November 12, 1931.

In 1934, Hemingway purchased a boat, naming it the Pilar, and began to sail the Caribbean.

Hemingway's desk, the table he used for writing, at his home in Key West, Florida

Hemingway's WWI paramedic cap

A Farewell to Arms

His new book told about an American soldier who served with the Italian army during World War One. He meets an English nurse, and they fall in love. They flee from the army, but she dies during childbirth. Some of the events are taken from Hemingway's service in Italy. The book is called A Farewell to Arms.

Part of the book talks about the defeat of the Italian army at a place called Caporetto:

"At noon we were stuck in a muddy road about as nearly as we could figure, ten kilometres from Udine. The rain had stopped during the forenoon and three times we had heard planes coming, seen them pass overhead, watched them go far to the left and heard them bombing on the main highroad. . . .

Later we were on a road that led to a river. There was a long line of abandoned trucks and carts on a road leading up to a bridge. No one was in sight. The river was high and the bridge had been blown up in the center; the stone arch was fallen into the river and the brown water was going over it. We went up the bank looking for a place to cross. . . . we did not see any troops; only abandoned trucks and stores. Along the river bank was nothing and no one but the wet brush and muddy ground. "

Death in the Afternoon

A Farewell to Arms was very successful. It earned Hemingway a great deal of money. It permitted him to travel.

One place he visited was Spain, a country he loved. He said, "I want to paint with words all the sights and sounds and smells of Spain. And if I can write any of it down truly, then it will represent all of Spain."

He wrote a book called Death in the Afternoon. It describes the Spanish custom of bull fighting. Hemingway believed that bullfighting was an art, just as much as writing was an art. And he believed it was a true test of a man's bravery.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Hemingway also travelled to Africa. He had been asked to write a series of reports about African hunting. He said, "Hunting in Africa is the kind of hunting I like. No riding in cars, just simple walking and feeling the grass under my feet."

The trip to Africa resulted in a book called The Green Hills of Africa and many smaller stories.

One story is one of Hemingway's best. The story, called The Snows of Kilimanjaro, tells of Hemingway's fears about himself. It is about a writer who betrays his art for money and is unable to remain true to himself.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

In 1936, the Civil War in Spain gave him a chance to return to Spain and test his bravery again. He signed with North American Newspaper Alliance to cover the Spanish Civil War, and sailed from New York on February 27, 1937. Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn accompanied Hemingway.

The trip to Spain resulted in two works: a play called The Fifth Column, and a novel called For Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel tells the story of an American who has chosen to fight against the fascists. He realizes that there are lies and injustice on his side. But he sees no hope except the victory of his side. During the fighting, he escapes his fear of death and of being alone. He decides that "he can live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years."

Cuba and the Nobel Prize

Hemingway in the cabin of his boat Pilar, off the coast of Cuba, c. 1950

The book was a great success. Hemingway enjoyed being famous. His second marriage was ending. He divorced Pauline and married Martha Gellhorn. The couple decided to live in Cuba, near the city of Havana. Their house looked out over the Caribbean Sea.

But this marriage did not last long. They fought frequently and bitterly, until she left for Europe to report for Collier's in September 1943.

When America entered World War Two, Hemingway went to Britain as a reporter. Later he took part in the invasion of Europe and the freeing of Paris. During the war, Hemingway met another reporter, Mary Walsh. In 1945, when his marriage to Martha was legally over, he married Mary.

The Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he injured his knee and sustained another head wound. A few years later Mary broke first her right ankle and then her left in successive skiing accidents.

Hemingway sank into depression as his literary friends began to die. During this period, he suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes. Nonetheless, in January 1946, he began work on The Garden of Eden, finishing 800 pages by June.

In 1948, Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice for several months. While there, Hemingway fell in love with the then 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich. The platonic love affair inspired the novel Across the River and into the Trees, written in Cuba during a time of strife with Mary, and published in 1950 to negative reviews. The following year, furious at the critical reception of Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". Published in September 1953, The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1953. A month later he departed Cuba for his second trip to Africa.

Hemingway and Mary in Africa before the two plane accidents

While in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in successive plane crashes, in January 1954. He had chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary. On their way to photograph Murchison Falls from the air, the plane struck an abandoned utility pole and was forced into a crash landing. Hemingway sustained injuries to his back and shoulder; Mary sustained broken ribs and went into shock. After a night in the brush, they chartered a boat on the river and arrived in Butiaba, where they were met by a pilot who had been searching for them. He assured them he could fly out, but the landing strip was too rough and the plane exploded in flames. Mary and the pilot escaped through a broken window. Hemingway had to smash his way out by battering the door open with his head. Hemingway suffered burns and another serious head injury. They eventually arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway's death. He briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating in Nairobi. Despite his injuries, Hemingway accompanied Patrick and his wife on a planned fishing expedition in February, but pain caused him to be irascible and difficult to get along with. When a bushfire broke out, he was again injured, sustaining second-degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow.

In November 1956, while staying in Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir A Moveable Feast. By 1959, he ended a period of intense activity: he finished A Moveable Feast (scheduled to be released the following year); brought True at First Light to 200,000 words; added chapters to The Garden of Eden; and worked on Islands in the Stream. The last three were stored in a safe deposit box in Havana as he focused on the finishing touches for A Moveable Feast.

In 1959, Hemingway bought a home overlooking the Big Wood River, outside Ketchum and left Cuba.

Death

Ernest Hemingway took his own life at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

Interesting facts about Ernest Hemingway

During his literary career, Hemingway wrote seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works.
His mother taught him to play the cello when he was a child.
Hemingway suffered a severe head injury in Paris. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life.
He was present at the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944; however contrary to legend, he was not the first into the city nor did he liberate the Ritz.
Ernest Hemingway owned many cats, especially cats with extra toes. Today these cats are sometimes called Hemingway cats in his honor. His house in Key West, Florida is now a home for his cats and their kittens.
In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature but was too sick to take part in the ceremony.

Ernest Hemingway quotes

"Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try."
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self."
"When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead."
"Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail."
"Easy writing makes hard reading."
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

Influence and legacy

A life-sized statue of Hemingway by José Villa Soberón at El Floridita, a bar in Havana

Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers who came after him either emulated or avoided it.

Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in the 1970s, she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. In 1980, a group of Hemingway scholars gathered to assess the donated papers, subsequently forming the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship", publishing The Hemingway Review. His granddaughter Margaux Hemingway was a supermodel and actress and co-starred with her younger sister Mariel in the 1976 movie Lipstick.

Writing style

Following the tradition established by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist. In 1954, when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."

Hemingway's fiction often used grammatical and stylistic structures from languages other than English. Critics Allen Josephs, Mimi Gladstein, and Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera have studied how Spanish influenced Hemingway's prose, which sometimes appears directly in the other language (in italics, as occurs in The Old Man and the Sea) or in English as literal translations. He also often used bilingual puns and crosslingual wordplay as stylistic devices.

In general, Hemingway avoided complicated syntax. About 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences without subordination—a simple childlike grammar structure.

Themes

Hemingway's writing includes themes of love, war, travel, expatriation, wilderness, and loss.

In Hemingway's fiction, nature is a place for rebirth and rest; it is where the hunter or fisherman might experience a moment of transcendence at the moment they kill their prey.

Selected works

This is a list of work that Ernest Hemingway published during his lifetime. While much of his later writing was published posthumously, they were finished without his supervision, unlike the works listed below.

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
in our time (1924)
In Our Time (1925)
The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Men Without Women (1927)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Images for kids

Hemingway was the second child and first son born to Clarence and Grace.
The Hemingway family in 1905 (from the left): Marcelline, Sunny, Clarence, Grace, Ursula, and Ernest
Hemingway in uniform in Milan, 1918. He drove ambulances for two months until he was wounded.
Hemingway in American Red Cross Hospital, July 1918
The Hemingway House in Key West, Florida, where he lived between 1931 and 1939 and where he wrote To Have and Have Not
Ernest, Pauline, Bumby, Patrick, and Gloria Hemingway pose with marlins after a fishing trip to Bimini in 1935
Hemingway (center) with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and German writer Ludwig Renn (serving as an International Brigades officer) in Spain during Spanish Civil War, 1937
Hemingway with Col. Charles "Buck" Lanham in Germany, 1944, during the fighting in Hürtgenwald, after which he became ill with pneumonia.
Hemingway bird-hunting at Silver Creek, near Picabo, Idaho, January 1959; with him are Gary Cooper and Bobbie Peterson
Hemingway Memorial, Sun Valley, Idaho