(1899-1961)
Who Was Ernest Hemingway?
Ernest Hemingway, one of only 13 Americans who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954), is renowned for novels such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Before becoming famous as a short story writer and novelist, he served in World War I and worked as an ambulance driver and war correspondent. He also published noteworthy non-fiction, including A Moveable Feast.
He traveled widely, was an avid sportsman, and lived around the world, in places such as Madrid, Paris, Key West, and Cuba. Readers admired his exciting, complicated life, despite its convoluted and intense mixture of violence and cruelty along with love affairs and heroism, as much as they admired his writing. “There were so many sides to him, that he defied geometry,” his first wife, Hadley Richardson, said.
While struggling with physical and mental health issues, as well as alcoholism, Hemingway committed suicide when he was 61. With this sorrowful ending, there is disagreement about whether he achieved his primary goal: “I have always had the illusion it was more important—or as important—to be a good man as to be a great writer. I may turn out to be neither, but would like to be both.”
QUICK FACTS
FULL NAME: Ernest Hemingway
BORN: July 21, 1899
BIRTHPLACE: Cicero (now Oak Park), Illinois
DIED: July 2, 1961
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
Early Life and Beginning Journalism Career
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now Oak Park), Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the eldest son, and the second child, of Clarence and Grace Hemingway’s six children. The family also spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there that the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and appreciate the outdoors.
Both of Hemingway’s parents were strong personalities, and his father physically punished him, and was often depressed. Twice, his father left the family to recover from his mood disorder, and, much later, just at the beginning of his son’s successful career as a novelist, Hemingway’s father shot himself, as did Hemingway’s brother and sister. Mental illness and suicide was a generational issue in the family.
In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, The Trapeze, writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation, instead of going to college as his parents wished, nor heading oversees to war as he wanted, Hemingway went to work for the Kansas City Star, gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down fiction and nonfiction writing style.
He once said, “On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”
Early Military Experience and Writing
In 1918, Hemingway wanted to enlist in World War I, but due to his weak eyesight, instead served overseas as an Italian Army ambulance driver. After volunteering to go to the front lines, Hemingway sustained a concussion and other injuries from 220 shards of shrapnel, which landed him in a Milanese hospital. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for his “admirable spirit of fraternity.”
There, Hemingway, met an older American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky who returned his feelings. She was transferred to a Florence hospital, and they wrote dozens of letters to each other. Although already engaged to an American back home, she nevertheless accepted Hemingway’s marriage proposal. Their relationship inspired his earliest fiction, which he wrote on Red Cross stationary while hospitalized in both Europe and then when he returned to Illinois—only 20 years old.
He returned to a job at the Toronto Star, but eventually got word from Agnes that she did not love him and would marry another man. Devastated, he began to consistently drink alcohol, and, as he said, “rushed” two or three girls at a time. His behavior appalled his parents, and they did not want him in their home any longer, although they did not cut off contact with him. This is when he moved to Chicago and began to write fiction. Despite an appearance of bravado, after the war, Hemingway would be afraid of sleeping alone and of the dark for the rest of his life.
This early part of his adulthood served as a template for the rest of his life. Hemingway continued to take part in, and write about, violent conflicts for decades, including the Spanish Civil War and World War II, where he witnessed both D-Day and the liberation of Paris. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his World War II service.
Despite his willingness to risk his life, as well as his physical and mental health, Hemingway hated war. In fact, it was precisely because of his wartime experiences that he wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
Wives, Children, and Grandchildren
From the beginning of his adult life, Hemingway had complicated romantic and family situations. He always had the next woman in his life before he let go of the first one, and often married his next wife less than a few weeks after divorcing the previous woman.
He was married four times. First to Hadley Richardson in 1921 (they divorced 1927) and then to Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 (divorced 1940). He married Martha Gellhorn, considered one of the greatest war correspondents of all time, in 1940, but they divorced in 1945. His last wife was Mary Welsh in 1946, and she remained his wife until his death, although that marriage was often unhappy and violent.
While still a young man in Chicago, Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Star.
In 1923, moved to Toronto where she gave birth to their son, John “Bumby” Hadley Nicanor while Hemingway was in New York. Hemingway did not feel he was ready to be a father, and frequently traveled without his wife and child. When they returned to Paris, Hemingway decided to give up newspaper writing and became a full-time fiction writer.
There are many stories and books about Hemingway’s marriages and love affairs. For example, Hadley moved with him to Paris shortly after their wedding. During this time, she lost the beginning of his first novel and some short stories, which Hemingway wrote about in A Moveable Feast. After they returned to Paris, Hemingway had an affair in 1926 with her best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, which caused their divorce, and whom he later married. All of the royalties from his first novel went to Hadley, as Hemingway had intense guilt about the way he treated her.
Jack Hemingway, Hemingway’s son, also became a writer after serving and being captured by the Germans during World War II. He eventually lived in Ketchum, Idaho near his father. His children included Joan Whittlesey “Muffet” Hemingway, Margot (later known as Margaux) Louise Hemingway, and Mariel Hadley Hemingway. His daughters accused him of sexual abuse. Margaux committed suicide and Mariel, who had become a more successful model and actress than her sister, made a documentary about her family called “Running from Crazy,” which explored the family’s history of substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide.
After World War II, Pauline Pfeiffer, who eventually became Hemingway’s second wife, traveled with the Hemingways throughout Europe, and also worked in Paris as a writer for Vogue, as well as other magazines. Hadley watched them fall in love, although was clear that Pfeiffer befriended her first and then stole Hemingway from her. Pfeiffer and Hemingway had two sons, Patrick in 1928 and Gregory in 1931. Eventually, they moved to Key West, Florida and summered in Wyoming, but their marriage did not last long.
Throughout his life, Gregory Hemingway dressed in women’s clothing and, later, he transitioned to become Gloria Hemingway. Throughout his youth and young adulthood, Gregory and Hemingway were often estranged, beginning in 1951 when the young Hemingway (as he was then called) was arrested for entering a women’s bathroom dressed as a woman. Ernest Hemingway and his ex-wife Pauline argued intensely about the arrest, and Pauline died the following day from what appeared to be a stress-related condition. This was one of the causes of the estrangement.
Patrick was devoted to his father and took care of his literary estate until his death in 2025.
While he was still married to Pauline, Hemingway continued to travel extensively, including big-game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, and deep-sea fishing in Florida. Then, in 1937, he returned to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War and met fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who had an extraordinary writing career of her own.
Gellhorn had traveled extensively to cover news stories, and had also lived at the White House with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She met Hemingway in 1936 and together they traveled to Spain in 1937 and 1938. During this time, she traveled to Germany and Czechoslovakia. She reported on the war from all over the world, including Burma.
Most impressively, pretending to be a nurse, she was the only woman to cross the English Channel during the D-Day invasion. She landed with soldiers near Omaha Beach. Because women were not allowed to cover this type of action, she was arrested and lost her war correspondent accreditation. Once released, she flew to Italy, saying later, “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.” She was also among the first journalists to report from a concentration camp.
After living together throughout the late 1930s, Gellhorn and Hemingway married in November 1940 and purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba. Gellhorn continued to travel, though, throughout the war, and Hemingway resented not only her travels, but her success, writing to her: “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?” He had tried to stop her from traveling with the D-Day invasion troops. They divorced in 1945.
Gellhorn continued to work as a war correspondent through the Vietnam War and other very dangerous situations. She wrote many books, and books and movies have been written about her and her relationship to Hemingway.
Toward the end of World War II, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh. They lived in Cuba and, in 1959, moved to Ketchum, Idaho.
The Lost Generation
After World War I and with his first wife, Hemingway moved to Paris, and became a key member of the artistic group that Gertrude Stein would famously call “The Lost Generation.” Hemingway used the term in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. In this phrase, Stein was referring to the feeling of hopelessness that anyone who had lived through “the war to end all wars” carried within them. Ironically, this inner sadness was often hidden by a love of frivolity, including drinking, sexual freedom, and the ability to travel and live cheaply.
With Stein as his mentor, Hemingway made the acquaintance of many of the great writers and artists of his generation, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce. He also traveled throughout Europe, including to Pamplona, Spain in which he discovered a lifelong passion for bullfighting.
Novels and Short Stories
Hemingway was famous for his direct and terse writing style, which grew directly out of his journalism work. Even in his fiction, he rarely used adjectives and adverbs, and relied on repetition and clarity to create atmosphere and mood. He describing his writing as the “Iceberg Theory,” believing that the omitted part of a story, i.e., the bottom of the iceberg, was the strongest part and that readers would understand the intention without having to be directly told what a story meant or its overarching theme. Because of this stripped down style, many of his greatest works are novellas.
For example, “Hills Like White Elephants,” a short story included in Men Without Women, is about an abortion, but the word is never mentioned. Instead, the male protagonist keeps pushing the woman to do something and minimizing the experience. At one point, she responds, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
This is another significant style element of Hemingway’s—the use of repetition, often of words considered unimportant, such as in the famous first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms which includes the word “and” 14 times:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”
In terms of theme, Hemingway’s fiction always features a specific type of man—brave, strong, and what many consider to be stereotypically masculine in the face of violence, including war and physical challenges, such as bullfighting and sport fishing. The protagonists are also deeply wounded, sometimes physically, but always emotionally, and often because of love. They are complicated despite speaking simply and directly. The women are as strong and opinionated as the men, and he directly explored the similarities and differences between men and women in much of his work. Hemingway sometimes wrote about men witnessing the courage and pain of women during sex, rape, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and childbirth, but he often described those events as unimportant and not worthy of a real man’s attention. He was nevertheless lauded for realistically describing these actual events.
Similarly, Hemingway used the stereotypes and words of his time to write about other races and religions, including Black people and Jewish people. Due to this, many contemporary writers and scholars do not consider him worthy of attention.
A prolific writer, some of Hemingway’s greatest works, including Islands in the Stream, were published after his death.
Non-Fiction Books
Personal Struggles and Suicide
In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, he suffered from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease. Furthermore, throughout his adult life, Hemingway continued his forays into Africa and sustained several injuries during his adventures, which included surviving multiple plane crashes. Adding to his war injuries, heavy drinking, and the concussions he suffered throughout his life, many now think his depression and moodiness were due to Chronic Traumatic Cencephalopathy (CTE).
In Idaho, he continued to battle with deteriorating mental and physical health. His wife Mary was the person who heard him fire the shot that killed Hemingway and who discovered his body, although she at first said it was an accident, she later admitted it was suicide.
Legacy
Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.
When asked by George Plimpton about the function of his art, Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the “one true sentence”: “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”
QUOTES
- Never confuse movement with action.
- There is no friend as loyal as a book.
- Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
- Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. It will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
- An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
- The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
- Write drunk, edit sober.
- All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
- All thinking men are atheists.
- It’s good to have an end to journey to; but in the end it’s the journey that matters.
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Since 2010, Donna Raskin, a longtime writer and editor, has taught history classes at the College of New Jersey. As a child, she read and re-read every book in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. As an adult, she collects fashion history books and has traveled to Paris on a fashion history tour. In addition to contributing to Biography.com, she is the senior health and fitness editor at Bicycling and Runner’s World.
