Ernest Hemingway Biography

1899 was the year in which Cuba, with the help of the US Army, was finally able to gain independence from Spain. It was also the year in which the American writer Ernest Miller Hemingway, popularly known as Ernest Hemingway, was born on July 21st in a suburb of Chicago called Oak Park, located in the state of Illinois.

Author of emblematic novels such as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, among other works that awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Ernest was also known to have been a strong man, sportsman, and lover of alcohol and hunting, it would be strange to know that his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher, dressed him as a girl until he was six years old. It was because of this, and for having forced him to take lessons in cello, that Hemingway hated her for a great part of his life. On the other hand, his father, Clarence Hemingway, was a doctor and was the one who would inspire him later to save lives and end his life.

In 1913, Ernest Hemingway entered the Oak Park & ​​River Forest High School, where he was known for his great ability in sports, especially football and boxing; and for writing for the school newspaper. Without entering the university, in 1917 Hemingway jumped from the reportage in his school to the Kansas City Star, where he was a journalist. The style of this newspaper, characterized by the use of short phrases and a vigorous language, exerted a strong influence on his spare and minimalist prose. A year later, he wanted to enlist in the Armed Forces of his country to fight in the First World War; but he was not admitted because of his bad eyesight. However, he went to the Red Cross recruitment in Kansas City and went to Italy as an ambulance driver. In the middle of that same year, Hemingway returned to the United States with his legs wounded and with the Silver Medal for Military Valor for having rescued a soldier who was badly wounded by the shrapnel ejected from a mortar.

“It takes two years to learn to talk and sixty to learn to shut up.” Ernest Hemingway

A letter from Agnes von Kurowsky came to his hands in 1919. She was a nurse whom he had met while recovering from her legs in Italy, and from whom he had fallen deeply in love, to the point of asking her to marry him. In that letter, Agnes confessed that she was in love and committed to an Italian officer. Catherine Barkley, the character of “A farewell to arms” is inspired by this personal story.

In 1920, he became a reporter for the Toronto Star, which moved him to Chicago, where he married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in 1921. That same year, he traveled as a foreign correspondent to Paris, where he met and became part of the group of modern writers and artists known as The Lost Generation, which had members like Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso

and Joan Miró. Three stories and ten poems were born from his trip outside the United States, In Our Time, The torrents of spring, A moveable feast, Men Without Women, and his son John Hadley Nicanor was also born.

A year after divorcing Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in 1927, he settled with his new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer in Key West. The following year brought two great events for Hemingway: on June 28, his son Patrick was born. In the middle of winter, his father, Clarence, committed suicide with a pistol that had been given to him as a reward for participating in the Civil War.

Ernest would publish “A farewell to arms” in Key West. In Kansas City, on November 12, 1931, her son Gregory Hancock Hemingway was born, who would later be renamed Gloria and undergo sex reassignment surgery.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway agreed to work as a correspondent for the conflict in 1937 for the North American Newspaper Alliance. During his trip, he was accompanied by an old friend, journalist and also writer, Martha Gellhorn. In 1939, Hemingway traveled to Cuba with a fishing vessel that he would later use to hunt German submarines. Along with Martha, he rented Finca Vigía, a property of enormous dimensions near La Havana.

In 1940, he married Martha in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and finished writing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in Cuba. That same year, he asked the Cuban government to adjust his ship for the hunt of possible German enemies.  Although he never fired in the Caribbean waters, he overcame dangers for the Collier’s Magazine in 1944 when he was a correspondent in the Second World War, which earned him a Bronze Star for performing with courage.

Around 1945, he divorced Martha and in 1946 he married Mary Welsh, who for that year suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Hemingway did not become a father again.

While his friends from the Lost Generation died one by one, Hemingway worked on the other side of the river and among the trees. In 1952, he published The Old Man and the Sea, a short novel that gave him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, he would win the Nobel Prize “For his mastery in the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and by the influence, he has exerted on contemporary style.” However, as he was hurt by two plane crashes he had had in Africa years earlier, he could not go to the ceremony in Stockholm, so he sent the US ambassador, John C. Cabot, on his behalf.

Hemingway decided to leave Cuba in 1961 and went to Idaho when the Cuban revolution was at its peak, just like when he was born. That same year, 19 days after his 62nd birthday, Hemingway committed suicide just like his father, although changing the gun for a shotgun.

Finca Vigia was converted by the Cuban government into the Hemingway Museum, which still today shows the best years of the author.