Big Two-Hearted River

Ernest Hemingway was one of the 20th century’s most prominent authors, famous not only for his fiction but for his adventurous life as a world traveler, hunter, fisherman, and reporter covering five wars. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. Hemingway was the second child of six, with one brother, Leicester, and four sisters: Marcelline, Carol, Madelaine, and Ursula.

While his mother urged him to play the cello, it was his father’s love of the outdoors that captured Hemingway’s heart. Each summer, his father would take the family to Windemere, a summer cabin that he built on Walloon Lake on the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where they had many fishing, hunting, and camping adventures. Though Hemingway played football in high school, he turned to boxing, a sport he practiced throughout his life, with more passion than skill. As Stephen Gertz asserts, Hemingway “had delusions of competence” (Gertz, Stephen J. “Ernest Hemingway: Down for the Count.” Fine Books & Collections, Sept. 2009).

After high school, Hemingway became a reporter for the Kansas City Star where he was instructed to avoid clichés and use short sentences, short first paragraphs, and vigorous English, a style that he employed throughout his career. When the US entered World War I in 1917, Hemingway tried to enlist in the army but was rejected for poor eyesight. Instead, he signed up to be an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy when he was 18 years old. Six months later, he was wounded when a mortar exploded and sent shrapnel into both of his legs. Despite his injuries, he carried an Italian soldier to safety and was hit by machine gun bullets. He spent six months in a hospital and, while there, fell in love with an American Red Cross nurse, whom he thought he would marry. The relationship inspired Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. Following his return from the war in 1919, he received a letter from the nurse telling him she was engaged to someone else, devastating Hemingway.

Hemingway later married a wealthy heiress named Hadley Richardson. The couple moved to Paris, where they lived near other artists, poets, and writers in the Latin Quarter. He wrote articles for Canada’s Toronto Sun and produced a series of short stories. In 1922, he went to Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey for the New York Sun. That same year, a suitcase full of all that he had written was lost at the Lyon train station. The manuscripts were never discovered, and Hemingway was devastated.

In 1923, Hemingway traveled to Spain, on Gertrude Stein’s advice, to seek out new stories and there discovered the thrill of bullfighting. He described bullfighting as “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor” (Death in the Afternoon 91). In 1926, Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which was inspired by his trip to Spain. It recounts the experiences of a group of American and British tourists traveling along the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage route, from Paris to the city of Pamplona, Spain, where they watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The novel depicts the Lost Generation not as decadent and damaged, but as strong and determined.

Hemingway and Hadley divorced in 1927, and he married an Arkansas heiress named Pauline Pfeiffer. In 1933, they traveled 300 miles by train through Africa. The adventure led to the novel Green Hills of Africa and several short stories. During the 1930s, Hemingway spent winters deep-sea fishing in Key West, and summers big game hunting in Wyoming.

In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain where he again covered the Spanish Civil War for newspapers in North America. There he met Martha Gellhorn, an American novelist, travel writer, journalist, and war correspondent. Gellhorn inspired Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published in 1940. That same year, Hemingway divorced Pfeiffer and married Gellhorn. They traveled through China, and then lived in Cuba. When World War II began, Hemingway volunteered to look out for German submarines in the Caribbean, and then became a war correspondent accompanying Allied troops as they landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He was present at the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.

In 1944, Hemingway once again divorced and married a Time magazine reporter named Mary Welsh, whom he met in London. They lived in Venice for a while, then returned to Havana, Cuba, spending summers at a cabin he built in Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway developed health problems in the late-1940s including severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and diabetes, all of which mostly resulted from previous accidents and heavy drinking. He also began experiencing depression.

In 1952, Hemingway published his novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1953, he and Mary traveled through Africa, where they were in two plane crashes from which Hemingway received various injuries. In Entebbe, Congo, Hemingway recuperated and read the obituaries that had been mistakenly published about him. In October 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hemingway spent his final years dealing with physical illnesses and depression, undergoing electric shock therapy. In 1959, he returned to Spain to complete a series of articles on bullfighting commissioned by Life magazine, resulting in his book The Dangerous Summer. He also worked on a memoir titled A Moveable Feast. Both were published posthumously. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.