Ernest Hemingway

When war broke out, Hemingway tried to enlist but was turned down on account of poor vision in his left eye. Undeterred, he joined the red cross in Europe as an ambulance driver, and was stationed in Milan. Within weeks, he was hospitalised with severe leg wounds, commended for “an admirable spirit of brotherhood” having rendered “generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion” (excerpt from the official citation with the medal he received).

Sent home, Hemingway spent time reading and giving small speaking engagements about his war experiences. He soon moved to Chicago, having accepted a position as the tutor to the son of a Woolworth’s company executive; the job gave him time to write and work for the Toronto Star Weekly. In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson and -on the advice of Sherwood Anderson, a friend and writer- the couple moved to France; he as the European correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. In Paris, Hemingway's initial 'literary aspirations' have been described as purely speculative. He met and made friends with the wealth of prominent, influential writers and artists there, including Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wyndahm Lewis. Covering the Geneva Conference in 1922, he began to make a name for himself as a reporter and also as an up-and-coming fiction writer. In 1923, he spent time in Toronto, waiting for his first child to arrive, but the couple soon moved back to Paris. In 1924, he edited The Translatlantic Review, with a recommendation from Ezra Pound as a writer of ‘very good verse’ and ‘the finest prose stylist in the world.’ Some of his early stories were published in the magazine.

By 1929, Hemingway had written and published some of his most famous works of prose, including The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and his reputation was well established. A Farewell to Arms was for many his first masterpiece, casting him in a whole new light. He had remarried in 1927 and moved to Key West, Florida, where he would live and work for nearly twelve years, and father two children. In 1937, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, where he also conducted an affair with a writer, Martha Gellhorn. He would use his experiences as a basis for the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. After returning to America in 1939, he remarried again and moved to Havana, Cuba. For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940, a critical and commercial success.

The next decade was quiet for Hemingway as regards fictional publications; he had several large projects going that he would never publish himself, and became involved in reporting World War II in the spring of 1944. He was injured in a car crash in London, and his third wife’s reported reaction to his wounds has been seen as a deciding factor in the subsequent breakdown of their marriage. Hemingway pursued Mary Welsh, an English woman who became his fourth and last wife.

After the war, he returned to America but, for the critics, failed to deliver a ‘great war novel.’ Across the river and into the trees was criticized as ‘sentimental’ and ‘boorish.’ Seeking to restablish himself, Hemingway ‘replied’ with The Old Man and the Sea, another commercially and critically acclaimed novel. Following the novel’s success, he made several trips to Europe and to Africa. In 1954, on safari, an unlucky chain of two small plane accidents resulted in multiple, severe injuries to his limbs, his senses, his and his internal organs. The same year, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but could not attend the award ceremony.

His physical deterioration was ecsacerbated over the next few years, and left him, though working, with mood swings and serious depression. He moved in 1960 from Cuba to Idaho, where he began to talk of suicide. Electro shock therapy, rather than improving his condition, impaired his memory and made writing almost impossible. In 1961, he committed suicide as his father had, with a gun.

Eighty-eight of Hemingway's poems exist in print. His one book of poems (and stories) was also his first published work, Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923), of which three hundred copies were printed. Many of the eighty-eight appeared in small Paris magazines during the 1920s. A pirated collection was also published a year before his death, entitled Collected Poems Originally Published in Paris.

^according to a Star employee