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Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
Born Ernest Miller Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois on 21 July, the future writer was part of a large upper-middle class family, having an estranged relationship with his mother and to a lesser extent the town in which he was born, a suburb of Chicago he later described as having "broad lawns and narrow minds." A mediocre athlete in high school, young Ernest preferred working on the school paper, where his first articles appeared. Following graduation, he skipped college to take a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. The paper's basic rules for writers, requiring concise sentences and paragraphs, with an active and immediate verbal style, played a major influence on the aspiring writer's craft. When America entered the First World War, Hemingway tried to enlist but was refused because of poor vision in his left eye. He instead volunteered as an ambulance driver on the front lines for the Red Cross. Shipped to Milan, his first job was to carry away the mutilated corpses of a munitions factory explosion. While passing out chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers on the Austrian front, Hemingway was struck in the leg by shrapnel from an exploding mortar. Unconfirmed reports were that the young man insisted on helping other victims of the explosion out of the trenches before accepting any help for himself. Hemingway later claimed to have had an out-of-body experience during the incident, likening the temporary departure of his soul to pulling a handkerchief out of a pocket. This poetic description of death, together with his headstrong willingness to put himself in danger, may have been the first manifestations of the bipolar disorder that would later claim his life and in fact was present among many members of the Hemingway family. Temporarily crippled and recovering in a Milan hospital, he was awarded the Silver Medal of Valor by the Italian Army. The entire experience, including a romance with his nurse, inspired one of his earliest novels, A Farewell to Arms. Returning home in 1919, Ernest spent a year living off insurance payments he received for his injuries, resisting his parents' pressures to find work or go to college, and frustrated at his hometown's continued romantic notions about war, despite the horrors he had witnessed and told of at numerous lectures he held. A woman attending one of these lectures, Harriet Connable, hired the young war veteran as a tutor and mentor for her son, a young man who, though handsome and intelligent, was withdrawn and had a handicapped right arm. Some have speculated on a possible gay relationship between Hemingway and his charge, though no strong evidence exists to this effect. During this time, Hemingway also wrote articles for the Toronto Star Weekly. When the temporary position of tutor ended in 1920, he moved to Chicago, eschewing the benighted Oak Park for a friend's house in the city. It was here that he met his first wife, Hadley Richardson, whom he married in 1921. Shortly afterwards, Hemingway and his new bride moved to Paris, where Ernest worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. He soon met and joined the circle of Gertrude Stein. While he met and befriended many other literary luminaries then living in Paris, including James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Stein would prove to be the greatest influence on Hemingway as a writer, personally coaching and critiquing his writing. Gertrude also perceived homosexual tendencies in her protégé, but failed to convince him to acknowledge them or accept his bisexuality. This refusal to admit his gayness may have been another source of the wild, reckless, ultra-macho lifestyle for which Hemingway became so well known. It may also have been a contributing factor to his depression, heavy drinking, numerous failed marriages and, some claim, spousal abuse. In 1923 the Hemingways temporarily returned to America, where the hospitals and doctors were considered better, so that Hadley could give birth to their first child, John. They returned to Paris the following year, where Ernest edited the Transatlantic Review for Ford Maddox and contributed some of his first short stories. His first short story collection, In Our Time, appeared in 1925, and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, appeared in 1926. The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's first introduction of the Lost Generation to readers. Another short story collection, interestingly titled Men Without Women, appeared in 1927. By now, his marriage to Hadley had fallen apart, and he divorced her to marry Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion magazine reporter. They left Paris and settled in Key West, Florida, in 1928. That same year, Ernest's father killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Ernest rushed to Oak Park for the funeral where, in a macabre and incomprehensible gesture, his mother gave him the very gun his father had used to kill himself. After the funeral, Hemingway returned with Pauline to Key West, where they lived for twelve years. Living in Key West, where Pauline gave birth to his next two sons, Patrick and Gregory, Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, and his first nonfiction work, Death In the Afternoon, about bullfighting in Spain. A 1933 hunting trip to Africa inspired his nonfiction Green Hills of Africa, which was panned by critics, and his short stories "Snows of Killimanjaro," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," which were equally praised. In 1936 Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn at the now famous Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, and began a four year affair with her before finally divorcing Pauline and marrying Martha in 1940. In addition to his love for Martha, the divorce was motivated by a difference of opinion between Ernest and Pauline over the Spanish Civil War, which Ernest had covered as a reporter in 1937. Ernest supported the democratically elected Socialist government, while Pauline, a devout Catholic, supported the forces of Franco. Shortly after marrying Martha, Hemingway completed his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his experiences in Spain. He and Martha also left Key West for Cuba, settling in a new house dubbed Finca Vigia, or "Lookout Farm." Following For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway entered a ten year period during which he only worked sporadically on two works, Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, neither of which would be published until after his death. Aside from his correspondence pieces from the Italian front during the Second World War, he did no other writing, suffering a prolonged writer's block resulting from a depressive period he referred to as his "black ass days." An example of the extent of his depression is presented by an account of how Hemingway and his colleagues were eating dinner in a building very close to the battle lines as the Allies pushed their way up the Italian peninsula. When the building came under artillery fire, everyone ran for cover except Hemingway, who calmly continued eating his dinner, apparently not even caring if the next shell had his name on it. Injured in a car wreck in England in 1944, Hemingway was offended at Martha's seemingly uncaring reaction, and he divorced her in favor of his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. Soon afterward, he was among the first soldiers to enter Paris as it was liberated from the Nazis. He later joined his close friend General Buck Lanham on the front, where he witnessed Allied forces crossing into Germany, an event recorded in Across the River and into the Trees, which was published in 1950. In 1952 he wrote what some consider his best work, The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unfortunately, Hemingway suffered severe injuries in two nearly consecutive plane crashes during a tour of Uganda, and was unable to attend the award ceremony in Sweden. These same injuries impaired Hemingway's ability to write, and damage to his liver and one kidney during the second crash persuaded Hemingway's doctor to forbid drinking, the writer's other great pleasure in life. It was around this time that Hemingway began giving the first direct hints of his suicidal nature. "When a man can't do the things he loves," he confided to a friend, "what is there to live for?" By the late fifties, Hemingway was again drinking, this time as much as a quart a day. His mood swings became more pronounced, and he looked visibly aged beyond his years. However he had finally returned to writing, working on his memoirs. In 1960 he left Cuba for a small ranch in Ketchum, Idaho. Not long afterwards, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, and like thousands of Americans that had made lives and fortunes in Cuba, Hemingway was unable to return. His beloved Finca Vigia, together with trophies and souvenirs from his world travels, manuscripts, drafts, and first editions of his books were all lost to him. Ernest Hemingway plunged in another deep depression, his last. After a friend had intervened and prevented him from shooting himself, Hemingway agreed to be admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, though during a flight connection he again attempted suicide by trying to walk into the plane's moving propeller. In the days before lithium and prozac, electro-shock therapy was the standard treatment for depression, and so was administered to Hemingway. Unfortunately, it also had the side effect of impairing memory, which had been one of the main tools that Hemingway used in writing his semi-autobiographical works. To him this probably seemed another loss to compound the one he had just suffered. Before his treatments could be completed, he convinced the staff at Mayo that he was fully recovered from his suicidal depression and was released. Returning to Ketchum, he spent the next six months passing through alternating phases of euphoria, depression, and paranoia. Finally, on the morning of 2 July in 1961, Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a gunshot to the head, as his father had done years earlier. While some critics have begun to question the real value and worth of his work, most continue to acknowledge the impact of Hemingway on the literature of the twentieth century, and his influence continues unabated into the twenty-first. To a lesser extent, Hemingway's life and history have lent clues to medicine's search for a cause and treatment for depression, particular where theories that a genetic predisposition for the condition may exist are concerned. In addition to his father and himself, a brother and sister of Ernest Hemingway, as well as his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, showed signs of depression and eventually committed suicide. Hemingway's transgendered youngest son Gregory, who died of natural causes while in police custody in October of 2001, also suffered depression and was an alcoholic. And the debate still continues as to whether Gertrude Stein's usually astute judgment of people was also correct where her protégé was concerned, and whether Hemingway's self-destructive behavior was in part motivated by a desperate desire to deny one part of himself. Ernest Hemingway's published works include Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923); In Our Time (1924, revised 1925); The Torrents of Spring (1926); The Sun Also Rises (1926, published in the UK as Fiesta); 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); and The Hemingway Reader (1953). Posthumously published works by Hemingway include Hemingway, The Wild Years (1962); A Moveable Feast (1964); Islands in the Stream (1970); The Nick Adams Stories (1972); Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961 (1981); The Dangerous Summer (1985); The Garden of Eden (1986); The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987); and True At First Light (1999). Hemingway Resource Center Hemingway Days Celebration in Key West Ernest Hemingway, Literary Traveller
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