Ernest Hemingway

Nicknamed "Papa," writer Ernest Hemingway was definitely a tortured soul, no matter how you look at it, but the question is how much of this was who he was, and how much was who he made himself into. There's no question that his death by suicide was some type of family connection, as he was in the second of three separate generations to end their own lives.

Born on July 21, 1899, in what was then a part of Cicero, Illinois, and is now Oak Park, Hemingway's physician father helped with the birth. The younger Hemingway was eighteen months younger than his sister, but his eccentric mother, always wanting twins, dressed the siblings alike, as if they were twins, even to the extent of putting her son in girls' clothing and referring to him as Ernestine. Although his mother hoped he would pick up her love of music, he instead came to love the outdoors, just like his father. In school, he enjoyed boxing and football, and also excelled in English, working on the school newspaper and literary magazine.

Instead of continuing his education in college, Hemingway became a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star, and the Star's style guide became his writing style for his published works, with things such as using short sentences and short first paragraphs, and using "vigorous English." Although his father was against it, after just six months with the Star, Hemingway left and tried to earn a spot in the Navy. When he was turned away with vision problems, he instead turned to the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.

Hemingway received a Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government, then was injured when his ambulance was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell, initially surviving by stuffing cigarette butts in the bullet holes to stave off the bleeding. While recuperating in a hospital in Milan, Hemingway fell in love with his nurse, Sister Agnes von Kurowsky. She was to leave with him when he was discharged and return to the States, but chose to stay behind and later became involved with an Italian officer. Hemingway had a hard time getting over this, and fictionalized the whole event in a later book.

Initially, Hemingway returned home to Oak Park, then moved to Toronto, Ontario, in 1920, to work for the Toronto Star. This was short-lived, however, as he returned to Chicago to work for a small newspaper, and also married Hadley Richardson. Their home still bears a plaque that reads "The Hemingway Apartment," despite the fact they weren't there long. By December of 1921, they moved to Paris, and Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star, and became friendly with fellow writers Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, and they were often seen drinking together in bars. In 1923, Hemingway's first book was published, Three Stories and Ten Poems, and his first son was born as well.

Having left the Star, Hemingway published a set of short stories in the U.S. titled In Our Time, in 1925. That same year, after F. Scott Fitzgerald released The Great Gatsby, Hemingway befriended him, and while they were great friends for awhile, later on they became somewhat competitive with each other. Fitzgerald's wife seemed jealous of the relationship, and accused the two of having a homosexual affair. Instead, Hemingway had a well-known case of homophobia, but it was the belief of some that it was actually a cover-up of his own secret sexual desires as a homosexual.

In 1926, Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, a semi-autobiographical novel about expatriate Americans traveling around Europe. He wanted to say it was completely original, but it was obviously reflective of The Great Gatsby. He divorced Hadley a year later, and married fashion reporter Pauline Pfeiffer, a Roman Catholic, and even converted his own faith to Catholicism. He published another collection of short stories, Men Without Women, the most famous of the stories being “The Killers.”

After a move to Key West, Florida, in 1928, Hemingway's father, very ill, committed suicide by shooting himself with a Civil War pistol. The younger Hemingway went back to Oak Park to help with the arrangements, and broght with him his newfound Catholic beliefs that people who commit suicide go to hell. Shortly after, a friend of his from Paris also committed suicide. The good news from that year was that Hemingway's second son was born, a very difficult labor for Pauline. Despite this, they had another child together a few years later.

It was in 1929 that Hemingway published the novel A Farewell to Arms, which told a story of an American soldier falling in love with a British nurse, obviously drawn on his experience in Milan. The nurse goes into tremendous pain in childbirth, obviously drawn on Pauline's experience. Success seemed to go his head some, though, as he criticized the work of Fitzgerald, and claimed another writer, Ford Madox Ford, was impotent. In return, he was attacked by these writers and others, as Fitzgerald claimed Hemingway was "a fag and a wife-beater," and that Pauline was a lesbian. Gertrude Stein, another old friend, claimed in a book that Hemingway had adapted his style from Sherwood Anderson's and her own.

Back in Key West, Hemingway was able to live the outdoorsman life he always enjoyed. He occasionally went to Spain, soaking up the atmosphere to use in the bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon, which was published in 1932. A year later he was on a safari in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, and wrote about his experiences in Green Hills of Africa. He also wrote two pieces of fiction of this time, “The Snows of Kilamanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

In 1937, after traveling to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, he not only had second thoughts about his Catholicism, but also divorced Pauline. He wrote a short story, “The Denunciation,” that went unpublished until after his death, but seemed autobiographical as it suggested he was an informant for the Republicans during the war and that he may have also been a weapons inspector. This seemed to be the beginning of his many health problems, not the least of which included an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, and hemorrhoids.

Hemingway's only play and forty-nine short stories were published together in 1938 as The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. After the Spanish Civil War, in which his people lost, he moved back to Key West, and married Martha Gellhorn, whom he had been with while in Spain. In 1940, another novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was published, and once again was a fictionalized account of real events, as it told the story of an American fighting during The Spanish Civil War, with a title borrowed from John Donne's Meditation XVII.

With the start WWI, Hemingway was again reporting on a war, and this time, reporting for Collier's Weekly, he was coming under suspicion from J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. Martha was also reporting on the war, and was more successful than Hemingway, as she dressed as a nurse, and was allowed in. To counter this, he has said he threw grenades into a cellar, and helped liberate Paris, but many historians believe he was only liberating the hotel bar. When the war was over, he began work on Garden of Eden, which went unpublished until after his death. He also began a trilogy about life on the sea, but only one of those parts were ever finished, and later became The Old Man and the Sea, which won him both a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize.

After Hemingway divorced Martha, he married another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, and wrote another novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, about life in Venice after WWII. The novel didn't do well, and he was heavily criticized. He embarked on another safari, and his health woes returned as he suffered from two separate plane crashes. A month later he was injured again in a bushfire incident, making him unable to travel to receive his Nobel Prize.

As some of his earlier manuscripts were unearthed, he published them under the title A Moveable Feast. His alcoholism was at an all-time high, and probably not so coincidentally, so was his depression. When conflict between the U.S. and Cuba escalated, he was forced from his Cuban home, and was under surveillance by the government. He published his manuscript for Death of Summer in Life magazine in a series of excerpts.

As his health and depression grew worse, Hemingway began getting shock treatments which were robbing him of his memory. After initially attempting suicide in April of 1961, he then underwent more shock treatments, and by July 2, 1961, his second suicide attempt, by shotgun blast, was successful. Mary released his unpublished and unfinished works at different times after his death, and has been criticized for doing so, with the thought that they may have been works Hemingway didn't want published. Continuing the legacy his father started, two of his siblings also committed suicide, and July 1, 1996, one day short of the 35th anniversary of his death, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, died of an overdose.

YUDDY