Ernest Hemingway

Oak Park was money and propriety, and the two parents pulled opposite ways. Clarence Hemingway, a physician, took the second of his six children up to Walloon Lake and taught him to shoot and fish. Grace Hall Hemingway, who had given up a singing career, taught him music. He edited the school paper, and after graduation went to the Kansas City Star for six months, where the stylebook instructed him to use short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English. He was 18 and driving a Red Cross ambulance in Italy when a mortar round at Fossalta di Piave put shrapnel through both legs on July 8, 1918. In the Milan hospital he fell for a nurse seven years older. She ended it by letter after he sailed home.

Seven novels, six story collections, two books of nonfiction. Paris from 1921 on a Toronto Star correspondent's wages, Key West from 1928, then the Finca Vigia outside Havana from 1939 and the boat he named Pilar. The Pulitzer came in 1953 and the Nobel in 1954, and he was too badly injured to go to Stockholm, so he sent a speech to be read for him. BriefHistory has the books and what they did to the American sentence. This page has the body that carried them around.

In January 1954 he went down twice in Africa in two days. The second crash cracked his skull, leaked cerebrospinal fluid, ruptured a kidney and his liver, and dislocated a shoulder, and a bushfire a few days later added second-degree burns. He was 54 and had already taken nine serious concussions, and he drank through all of it. By late 1960 he was certain the FBI was following him, which was not entirely a delusion — the Bureau had opened a file on him during the war and it ran to 124 pages. He checked into the Mayo Clinic under another name in November 1960 and took as many as 15 electroconvulsive treatments that December. He told a friend the treatments were erasing his capital.

Mary found him with a shotgun in the Ketchum kitchen on April 21, 1961. More shock treatment followed. He came home on June 30 and shot himself on the morning of July 2. The priest who buried him believed it had been an accident, and the family let that stand for years. Medical records released in 1991 confirmed the hemochromatosis diagnosed a few months before he died — the disease his father may also have had before shooting himself in 1928. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester killed themselves. So did his granddaughter Margaux, in 1996. Four books appeared after his death, all assembled by other hands, and the argument over that editing has never closed.

Ernest Hemingway's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Sun Also Rises book
  The debut novel, written in Paris 1926
• A Farewell to Arms book
  Built out of the Italian front and the Milan hospital 1929
• For Whom the Bell Tolls book
  Out of the Spanish Civil War, which he covered from 1937 1940
• The Old Man and the Sea book
  The Pulitzer, and the book the Nobel citation named 1952
• A Moveable Feast book
  The Paris memoir, assembled from his papers after his death 1964

• 1917 aged ~18 Goes to work as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star The paper's stylebook told him to use short sentences and vigorous English.
• July 8, 1918 aged 18 A mortar round wounds him at Fossalta di Piave He was 18 and driving an ambulance for the Red Cross.
• September 3, 1921 aged 22 Marries Hadley Richardson and sails for Paris
• December 1922 aged 23 Hadley loses a suitcase of his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon Almost all of his early fiction went with it.
• December 6, 1928 aged 29 His father shoots himself in Oak Park
• January 1954 aged 54 Survives two plane crashes in two days in Africa Fractured skull, ruptured kidney and liver, and burns from a bushfire days later.
• October 1954 aged 55 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Still recovering, he did not travel to Stockholm and sent a speech to be read.
• November 1960 aged 61 Admits himself to the Mayo Clinic under an assumed name
• July 2, 1961 aged 61 Shoots himself at his house in Ketchum, Idaho

• F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940
  Novelist who captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby, the defining novel of the American Dream. friend and rival
• William Faulkner 1897–1962
  Nobel laureate whose stream-of-consciousness novels set in Yoknapatawpha County reshaped American fiction. traded insults with
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. named as the ancestor
• Toni Morrison 1931–2019
  Nobel laureate whose novels, including Beloved, explored the African American experience with profound lyricism. read him against the grain
• John Steinbeck 1902–1968
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men chronicled American hardship. shared the decade and the prize