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Hemingway, Ernest
Category: Writer
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His 'economical and understated style' had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations.
Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms.
In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.
After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War where he had been a journalist, and after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present at the Normandy Landings and the liberation of Paris.
Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain or ill health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida (1930s) and Cuba (1940s and 1950s), and in 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho.
Ernest Hemingway was an alcoholic, but he may also have been suffering from the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration.
In 1960, he was checked in to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where “he may have believed he was to be treated for hypertension” he was “treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960”, in January 1961 he was "released in ruins".
Reynolds accessed Hemingway's records at the Mayo which also indicate “the combination of medications ..created a depressive state”.
Hemingway shot himself in July 1961.
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