Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway, was an American novelist and journalist. He was born on the 21st of July, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He took his own life, on July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway’s frugal and comprehensible style of writing had a substantial influence on the style of 20th-century fiction, whereas his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations of novelists. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. During the course of his career he published: seven novels, a collection of six short stories and two works of non-fiction. A further three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously.
His Early life
After finishing high school, Hemingway found employment with The Kansas City Star, newspaper where he worked for nine months. Following this brief period he tried to enlist in the army but was not accepted due to bad eyesight. Therefore he joined the red cross and left for the Italian front as an ambulance driver. He was subsequently seriously injured during the course of the war and spent a long period in hospital, he eventually returned home to the U.S. in 1918.
Hemingway’s wartime experiences on the Italian front, constituted the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms published in 1929 and subsequently made into a film in 1957. In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple relocated to Paris, where they lived in one of the poorest areas of the city, fortunately he found workas a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper. During his stay in Paris, he was greatly influenced by the modernist writers and friends such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other artists of the 1920s “Lost Generation” expatriate community.
Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. The following year in 1927, Hemingway divorce from Hadley Richardson and subsequently married Pauline Pfeiffer. However this marriage was also unsuccessful and the couple divorced upon Hemingway returne from the Spanish Civil War which he had been reporting on as a journalist. This period is characterized by the on start of the authors problem with alcohol. Based on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published in 1940 the book was a great success. The same year he married his third wife the reporter Martha Gellhorn who he had met in Spain during the civil war. When the U.S. entered the second world war, Hemingway went to Britain as a reporter, during the war he met Mary Walsh and later she became his wife. In 1947 he was awarded the bronze star for acts of bravery during the second world war. In the following years he lived in Cuba, where he wrote his acclaimed Pulitzer Prize novel The Old Man And the Sea. In 1954, while he was on a safari in Africa he was almost killed in two consecutive plane crashes which left him in pain and ill health for the remainder of his life. Hemingway had lived between Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, suffering from severe depression and problems with alcohol he put an end to his life in the summer of 1961.