Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21^st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, as the second child of Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher. Ernest Hemingway graduated from high school in June 1917 and took a job as cub reporter on the Kansas City Star in October.

In 1918, he sailed to Europe to assume duties as ambulance driver in Italy. He was injured in Fossalta and sent to Milan for hospitalisation. In 1919 he returned to America, in September 1920 he married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, with whom he lived in Paris. In 1923, he went to Spain for the bullfights at Pamplona. Then he returned to Toronto for the birth of his son John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. In 1927 Ernest and Hadley got divorced because of his love affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married later. Ernest and Pauline moved to Key West, where their son Patrick was born. In 1931, their second son, Gregory Hancock, was born.1939, Ernest and Pauline seperated and he married Martha Gellhorn. He bought a house in Cuba, where he spent most of the time alone because Martha was acting as a reporter in wartime England.

He observed D-day as correspondent in England, where he began a relationship with newswoman Mary Welsh. 1945 he divorced Martha and married Mary. Both lived in Cuba, his drinking had increased because many of his close friends including Pauline Pfeiffer, his mother and his publisher, had died. In 1953/54, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1960 he was already showing signs of mental illness, ha had a collapsing health and a alcohol addiction. In November, he´d found his memory had gone and he couldn´t write anymore. On Sunday 2 July 1961, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. Later, he was burried in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Books written by Hemingway:                                                     

Farewell to Arms 1929

While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederick Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends to him after he is wounded. She becomes pregnant but refuses to marry him, and he returns to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians' retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, leaving Henry desolate .

The Old Man and the Sea 1952

Short novel awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Completed after a 10-year literary drought, it was his last major work of fiction. The novel is written in Hemingway's characteristically spare prose. It concerns an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago who finally catches a magnificent fish(marlin) after weeks of not catching anything. After three days of struggling with the fish, he finally manages to reel it in and lash it to his boat, only to have sharks eat it as he returns to the harbour. The other fishermen marvel at the size of the skeleton; Santiago is spent but triumphant.

Bibliography (not all of his books!)

Three Stories & Ten Poems 1925 In our Time

Death in the Afternoon 1935 Green Hills of Africa

To Have and Have not 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls

Men at War