ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Brief Life of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a community outside of Chicago. His father, Clarence, was a medical doctor, and his mother, Grace, gave piano and voice lessons. The family spent summers in Upper Michigan, where Ernest was able to indulge his passion for fishing.

After his graduation from high school in 1917, Hemingway worked for awhile in Kansas City as a reporter for the Star. He wanted to enlist in the army during WWI, but his eyesight prevented that. Instead, Ernest drove ambulance for the Red Cross near the Italian front. He was himself wounded on July 8, 1918 and spent months in hospital convalescing.

Hemingway returned to the U.S., a bit of a local hero in Oak Park. He then went back to reporting, and, in 1921, he met, courted, and married Hadley Richardson of St. Louis. Upon the advice of Sherwood Anderson, the couple went to live in Paris. Ernest was working for the Toronto Star, and they were also living off Hadley's inheritance. But he was also polishing his fiction, and it was during this period of 1921-1926 that Ernest established his writing, especially the style that made him unique and very influential. His first volume of short stories, In Our Time, published in 1925, well illustrates his style. His memoirs of that period, published posthumously in 1964 under the title A Moveable Feast, are a wonderful and revealing personal account of the writers and artists and culture and life and times of Paris in the 1920s.

Ernest and Hadley had a son, John (nicknamed "Bumby"), in October 1923. The young family toured a lot of Europe, skiing in the winter and hiking various parts of central Europe. Also, during the summers, beginning in 1923, the Hemingways would travel to Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. These Spanish experiences provided the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926.

It was also during 1926 that Hemingway's marriage to Hadley broke up, after he had met the wealthy Pauline Pfeiffer. Ernest and Pauline were married in 1927, and they had two more sons: Patrick in 1928, and Gregory in 1931. It was during his marriage to Pauline that Ernest bought a house in Key West, Florida.

In the late 1930s, Hemingway met and fell in love with Martha Gellhorn, herself a journalist and writer. The two were married in 1940. Ernest purchased the Finca Vigia in Cuba. In 1944, he met and fell in love with Mary Welsh, divorcing Martha in 1945 and marrying Mary in 1946.

Not only a popular writer but also a Twentieth-century celebrity, Ernest Hemingway's enduring works are In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast, plus numerous short stories.

Timeline of Ernest Hemingway in Paris

This table is based on the one in Michael Reynolds's Hemingway: The Paris Years (Blackwell, 1989), volume 2 of his biography of Hemingway.