Salina High School South - Mr. Edwards - Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway

Biography

    Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at eight o'clock in the morning in Oak Park, Illinois July 21, 1899. In the nearly sixty two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century and created a mythological hero in himself that captivated and confounded not only serious literary critics but also the average man...in a word, he was a star.
    Born in the family home at 439 Oak Park Avenue, a house built by his widowed grandfather Ernest Hall, Hemingway was the second of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway's six children ; he had four sisters and one brother. He was named after his maternal grandfather Ernest Hall and his great uncle Miller Hall.
    Oak Park, Illinois was a mainly Protestant upper middle class suburb of Chicago that Hemingway would later refer to as a town of "wide lawns and narrow minds." Only ten geographic miles from the city, Oak Park was really much farther away philosophically. It was basically a conservative town that tried to isolate itself from Chicago's liberal seediness. Hemingway was raised with the conservative midwestern values of strong religion, hard work, physical fitness and self determination; if one adhered to these parameters, he was taught, he would be ensured of success in whatever field he chose.
    As a boy his father taught him to hunt and fish along the shores and in the forests surrounding Lake Michigan. The Hemingway's had a summer house called Windemere on Horton Bay at the northern end of Lake Michigan and the family would spend the summer months their trying to stay cool. Hemingway would fish the different streams that ran into the lake, or would take the row boat out on the bay and do some fishing there. He would also go squirrel hunting in the woods near the summer house, discovering early the serenity to be found while alone in the forest or on a stream. It was something he could always go back to throughout his life, wherever he was. Nature would be the touchstone of Hemingway's life and work, and though he often found himself living in major cities like Chicago, Toronto and Paris early in his career, once he became successful he chose somewhat isolated places to live like Key West, or San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, a small village outside of Havana, or after Cuba fell to Castro, Ketchum, Idaho. All were convenient locales for hunting and fishing.
    When he wasn't hunting or fishing by himself or with his father, his mother taught him the finer points of music. Grace was an accomplished singer who once had aspirations of a career on stage, but eventually settled down with her husband and occupied her time by giving voice and music lessons to local children, including her own. Hemingway never had a knack for music and suffered through choir practices and cello lessons, however the musical knowledge he acquired helped him share in his first wife Hadley's interest in the piano.
    Hemingway received his formal schooling in the Oak Park public school system. In high school he was mediocre at sports, playing football, swimming, water basketball and serving as the track team manager. He enjoyed working on the high school newspaper called The Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles, usually humorous ones where he imitated the popular satirist of the time, Ring Lardner. Hemingway graduated in the spring of 1917 and instead of going to college the following fall like his parents expected, he took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star; the job was arranged for by his Uncle Tyler who was a close friend of the chief editorial writer of the paper.
    At the time of Hemingway's graduation from High School,World War I was raging in Europe and despite Woodrow Wilson's attempts to keep America out of the war, the United States joined the Allies in the fight against Germany and Austria in April, 1917. When Hemingway turned eighteen he tried to enlist in the army, but was deferred because of poor vision; he had a bad left eye that he probably inherited from his mother ,who also had poor vision. When he heard the Red Cross was taking volunteers as ambulance drivers he quickly signed up. He was accepted in December of 1917, left his job at the paper in April of 1918, and sailed for Europe in May. In the short time that Hemingway worked for the Kansas City Star he learned some stylistic lessons that would later influence his fiction. The newspaper advocated short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy. Hemingway later said: "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the
business of writing. I've never forgotten them."
    Hemingway, upon reaching Europe, first went to Paris, then in early June, after receiving his orders, travelled to Milan, Italy. The day he arrived ,a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue...it was an immediate and powerful initiation into the horrors of war. Two days later he was sent to an ambulance unit at a the town of Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918, only a few weeks after arriving, Hemingway was seriously wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar shell which landed just a few feet away. At the time Hemingway, was distributing chocolate to Italian soldiers in the trenches near the front lines. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious while killing one Italian soldier and blowing the legs off another. What happened next has been debated for some time. In a letter to Hemingway's father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest's fellow ambulance drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of shrapnel being lodged in Hemingway's legs, he still managed to carry another wounded soldier back to the first aid station, along the way being hit in his legs by several machine gun bullets. Whether he carried the wounded soldier or not, doesn't diminish Hemingway's sacrifice. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valor with the official Italian citation
reading: "Gravely wounded by numerous peices of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirt of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been evacuated." Hemingway described his injuries to a friend of his: "There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the front. I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasn't dead any more."
    Hemingway's experiences in Italy, his wounding and his subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, his relationship with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and their eventual breakup, all inspired his great novelA Farewell To Arms.

1899 -- born in Oak Park, Illinois to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway (the mother to end all mothers!) on July 21

1917 -- Graduated from Oak Park H.S. and works as a reporter on the Kansas City Star Newspaper

1918 -- Enlists as an ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross. He is severly wounded on July 8th near the Piave River by mortar fire. Meets Agnes Von Kurowsky, a nurse, and they begin a relationship.

1920 -- Returns to U.S. and works as a reporter for the Toronto Star and Star Weekly. Meets Sherwood Anderson who influences and helps Ernest's early work no matter what Ernest says about Sherwood later in life!

1921 -- Meets and marries his first of four wives, Hadley Richardson of St. Louis

1922 -- In Europe he works with Ford Maddox Ford and becomes friends with many of the American Expatriates such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and others.

1924 -- in our time is privately published in small quantities (small book of short stories; probably the greatest and most influential short story collection to be published with maybe the exception of Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson)

1925 -- In Our Time is published in the U.S. Notice that he gets the capitalization correct this time!

1926 -- Publishes The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises (first novel) with Charles Scribner's Sons.

1927 -- Divorces Hadley Richardson; marries her friend Pauline Pfeiffer from St. Louis. Finds time to publish Men Without Women (second book of short stories)

1928 -- Moves to Key West, Florida (the estate is called Finca Figia, and if you're ever in Key West, you have got to go there and visit the bar Sloppy Joe's. It is worth the trip as opposed to visiting Plymouth Rock --boring!)

1929 -- Published A Farewell to Arms, a big success. The final draft was written in Kansas City and Salina, Kansas while he was hunting (Pauline was in difficult labor and Ernest had to get away for a while!). While in Salina he stays at the Log Cabin Inn which is a dump right now, but used to be one of the better hotels in Salina.

1933-4 -- Publishes third book of stories Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Makes first visit to Africa killing animals everywhere he can; also visits Paris and Spain. It's doubtful that he killed anything more than a few cases of alcohol in Europe!

1935 -- Publishes Green Hills of Africa, a beautiful book. Probably the second best book about Africa ever written (Dineson's Out of Africa is just as good or better).

1936 -- Covers the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance which provides background for a future novel.

1937 -- Publishes a so-so novel To Have and Have Not that is made into a great movie with Bogart and Bacall ('You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow.").

1940 -- Divorces Pauline Pfeiffer; marries Martha Gelhorn, a writer. This marriage makes no sense!

1942-4 -- War correspondent in Europe for WWII; flies with Royal Air Force, participates in Normandy invasion, fights his own private war to liberate paris, and attaches himself to the Fourth Infantry Division.

1950 -- Publishes Across the River and Into the Trees which is lambasted by the critics (I have a first edition copy of the book and it is not a good novel.).

1952 -- Picks himself up and publishes The Old Man and the Sea. It is a huge success and wins the Pulitzer Prize

1953 -- Revisits Africa and suffers TWO planes crashes within 24 hours of each other. To his ex-wives' dismay, he survives -- barely! He gets to read his own obitiuary in the papers when he is reported as dead.

1961 -- After bouts with alcohol, depression, diabetes, age, and a host of other physical and psychological problems, Hemingway kills himself using a shot gun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2.

1964 -- A Moveable Feast is published (great book of his early life in Europe before he made it big!)