Hemingway, Ernest Miller

(1899-1961)

   Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway was arguably the most significant voice of the “lost generation” of alienated Americans after World War I. He did not go to college, but in 1917 he began work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. In 1918, Hemingway went to Italy as a volunteer ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was wounded and hospitalized shortly after his arrival. In 1920, he found work with the Toronto Star, and he continued to submit articles first from Chicago and then after 1922, from Paris, France.

   Hemingway published a number of short stories while he was in Paris, where he became one of a group of expatriate writers and artists. His first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925), was followed by The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men without Women (1927), and A Farewell to Arms (1929). It was in the latter that he famously wrote that after the war “all gods were dead.”

   Hemingway returned to America in 1928 and settled in Key West, Florida, where he wrote a study of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932), followed by Winner Take Nothing (1933) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). He also published short stories and magazine articles. In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to report on the civil war. His book To Have and Have Not was published the same year. In 1939, Hemingway went to Havana, where he wrote his novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940. He wrote little of substance after this point, but he went to Europe as a war reporter for Collier’s in 1944 and took part in the D-Day landings. Another novel set in Italy, Across the River and into the Trees, appeared in 1950. In 1952, The Old Man and the Sea was published to considerable acclaim, and Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite these successes and twice surviving airplane crashes in Africa in 1954, Hemingway increasingly suffered from depression, and in 1961 he committed suicide.