Ernest Hemingway - Wikipedia

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced his wife in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been a journalist. He based For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) on his experience there. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present with the troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

Hemingway went on safari to Africa shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho where he ended his own life in mid-1961.

World War I
Early in 1918, after applying to serve with, and being turned down by, the US Army, Navy and Marines because of poor eyesight,[13] Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy.[14] He left New York in May and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery.[15] By June, he was at the Italian Front. It was probably around this time that he first met John Dos Passos, with whom he had a rocky relationship for decades.[16] On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion, where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments."[17] A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line.[17] Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.[18][note 2] He was still only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."[19] He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.[20] He spent six months at the hospital, where he met and formed a strong friendship with "Chink" Dorman-Smith that lasted for decades and shared a room with future American foreign service officer, ambassador, and author Henry Serrano Villard.[21]

While recuperating, he fell in love for the first time with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. By the time of his release and return to the United States in January 1919, Agnes and Hemingway had decided to marry within a few months in America. However, in March, she wrote that she had become engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers states in his book Hemingway: A Biography that Hemingway was devastated by Agnes's rejection, and in future relationships, he followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.[22]