Ernest Miller Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at 8 oclock in the morning in Oak Park, Illinois July 21, 1899. Hemingway was the second of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingways six children. He had four sisters and one brother. Hemingway was named after his grandfather Ernest Hall and his uncle Miller Hall. As a boy his father taught him to hunt and fish in the forests surrounding Lake Michigan.

The Hemingways had a summer house called Windemere on Horton Bay at the northern end of Lake Michigan.

In high school he was mediocre at sport, for example at playing football. He enjoyed working on the high school newspaper called The Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles, usually humorous ones where he imitated the popular satirist Ring Lardner. Hemingway graduated in the spring of 1917 and instead of going to college the following fall like his parents expected, he took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, the job was arranged by his uncle Tyler. At the World War I he was one of the ambulance man. Then he changed to the infantry and he was hurt. In 1921 he married the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson. In 1923 the family had their first child John. 1925 Ernest Hemingway wrote In Our Time, 1926 The Sun Also Rises, 1927 Men Without Women. In 1928 he married Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway had a second child Patrick. In 1929 he drew upon his World War I experiences for his novel A Farewell To Arm. Its a tragic love story. Then in the World War II he fought. In 1940 he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Then he married again, his wife was Martha Gelhorn. When America entered World War II at the end of 1941, Hemingway assumed the self-appointed post of an anti-submarine scout, using his fishing boat the Pilar to search the Nazi U-boats that might enter coastal waters around Cuba and Florida. In 1944 his wife Martha Gelhorn divorced him. Within months he married Mary Welsh, a war correspondent in Havana. Although he draft portions of this opus would be published after Hemingways death as Islands in the Stream, in 1951 he abandoned this grand vision and focused on one section of the project. The result was The Old Man And The Sea. It was a popular sensation, selling over 5 million copies in a matter of days and a major literary achievement for which he would the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway was unable to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremonies.

He was recuperating from injuries sustained in two successive airplane crashes while he was on one of his many African safaris. In the wake of the second and more serious crash it was initially reported that he had been killed. The last years of his life were marked by increasing depression and alcohol abuse. A shadow of his physical and intellectual self, Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961 by placing the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. During the next decade or so, several and works in progress, including A Moveable Feast and The Garden Of Eden were ...