About the Author

Characterized as an author of war -- what he claimed to be a natural condition of mankind -- Ernest Hemingway wrote some of the most poignant American fiction of the twentieth century. From Jake Barnes, in his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926) through Santiago, the old fisherman in Old Man and the Sea (1952), it is the characters responding to tumultuous world around them that set his works apart.

How his characters respond to conflict reflects a "code," or principled action, what Hemingway's publisher, Charles Scribner, identified as "simple strength of character, deeper than his will" (Desnoyers, "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy"). That code developed in response to experiences that extend to Hemingway's early childhood. Hemingway's father was a doctor who enjoyed the outdoors and introduced it to his son on numerous excursions to the Michigan north woods. The influence of these adventures figures distinctively in his later "Nick Adams" series of short stories.

Hemingway's early career in journalism provided a proving ground for the development of his terse writing style. After graduating from Oak Park High School in 1917, he moved to Kansas City to live for a short time with his uncle. He found work with the Kansas City Star, adopting the principles of journalistic style for his own.

After the United States entered the first world war in 1917, Hemingway responded to an appeal for personnel, and he accepted a post with an ambulance crew near the Italian/Austrian front lines. Injuries sustained from a mortar explosion and machine gun fire while saving a wounded Italian soldier brought him instant national and international attention as the first American to be wounded in the Italian front. While recovering, he fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, some six years his senior. She would become the inspiration for Catherine Barkley in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Married to Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives, in September, 1921, Hemingway and his bride followed Sherwood Anderson's advice and moved to Paris to join the American ex-patriots, whom Gertrude Stein christened the "Lost Generation." Paris proved productive to the young writer who had secured a contract to provide features for the Toronto Star. He traveled widely around Europe, taking copious notes that would later feed his stories and novels of the places that he came to love and celebrate in his literature. He covered the war between Turkey and Greece and discovered bullfighting in Pamplona, Spain. Much of these experiences found their way into his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926.

Hemingway's publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1928 followed more trauma in his life--the suicide by gunshot of Clarence Hemingway, his ailing father back in Oak Park, and his divorce and remarriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. With his second wife, Hemingway discovered the attractions of the Caribbean, Cuba, and Key West, where they settled. They also spent time in Wyoming and Montana. The gift of a trip to Africa from Pauline's uncle opened up Central Africa to him, and his safari became one of the most poignant experiences of his life, an additional reservoir from which he would draw.

In 1937, Hemingway signed on as a war corresponded to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Pauline was often away, and Hemingway was joined in Europe by a mutual friend and colleague, Martha "Marty" Gellhorn. Their affair resulted in Pauline's divorce from Hemingway, and he and Marty were married in 1940. Following Marty's assignment to follow the war in China, both of them settled on a farm in Cuba, overlooking the Havana harbor. He rested from the work of creative writing while keeping up, however, his "prodigious" round of correspondence. Following events in Europe, however, Marty encouraged her celebrity husband to join the war coverage as a correspondent, and Hemingway entered his third war as a professional journalist. Once more, Hemingway was charged by the assignment, composing feature articles on the war in Germany and across France, and once more, he developed a liaison with another woman, Mary Welsh. Having grown apart, Pauline and Hemingway were divorced, and he married Mary in March, 1940.

Mary and Ernest Hemingway returned to Havana after the war. It was there that he developed plans for yet another novel based upon the story of an old Cuban fisherman who battled with a mighty marlin. Published in 1954, Old Man and the Sea became an immediate international publishing phenomenon. The novella was to become his signature work. In the same year, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the highest acknowledgment of his lifetime of work, but an honor he could not accept in person, debilitated by his old injuries and sickness.

Beset by years of ill-health, accidents -- including two plane crashes that could have killed him -- and bouts with alcoholism and weight, Hemingway suffered from chronic headaches. Then, he contracted diabetes. Hemingway slipped in and out of despair. He traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis for treatments of his ailments. He felt desperately alone and isolated by his devolving condition, and at a new residence that he and Mary had purchased only a short time before in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway followed his father in suicide in July, 1961.

Given to characteristic spurts of creative energy from which emerged some of his most notable works, Ernest Hemingway was, nevertheless, a careful and meticulous writer who never forgot the "rules" of writing he learned in his youth. He followed the opportunities afforded by communities in conflict as well as the various exotic vistas that world travels opened to him, and each provided materials for his craft.