99 Facts About Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist.

Ernest Hemingway published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works.

Ernest Hemingway divorced Richardson in 1927, and married Pauline Pfeiffer.

Ernest Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

Ernest Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida and in Cuba.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21,1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician.

Ernest Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park from 1913 until 1917.

Ernest Hemingway was an accomplished athlete involved with a number of sports, including boxing, track and field, water polo, and football.

Ernest Hemingway performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline, and received good grades in English classes.

In December 1917, after being rejected by the US Army for poor eyesight, Ernest Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy, In May 1918, he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery.

Ernest Hemingway 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.

When Ernest Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry.

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships, Ernest Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.

Ernest Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment.

Ernest Hemingway returned to Michigan the following June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star.

In Paris, Ernest Hemingway met American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, Irish novelist James Joyce, American poet Ezra Pound and other writers.

Ernest Hemingway eventually withdrew from Stein's influence, and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that spanned decades.

Ernest Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and "Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany".

Ernest Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922.

The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Ernest Hemingway had written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the corrida.

Ernest Hemingway missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist.

Ernest Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published works by Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as well as some of Ernest Hemingway's own early stories such as "Indian Camp".

Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility".

Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year: Ernest Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.

Hadley would much later recall that Ernest Hemingway had his own nicknames for everyone and that he often did things for his friends; she suggested that he liked to be looked up to.

Ernest Hemingway did not remember precisely how the nickname came into being; however, it certainly stuck.

The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Ernest Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.

Ernest Hemingway suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain.

When Ernest Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer.

Ernest Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City, where their son Patrick was born on June 28,1928.

Ernest Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written to his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide.

Ernest Hemingway was joined there by Dos Passos, and in November 1930, after bringing Dos Passos to the train station in Billings, Montana, Hemingway broke his arm in a car accident.

Ernest Hemingway was hospitalized for seven weeks, with Pauline tending to him; the nerves in his writing hand took as long as a year to heal, during which time he suffered intense pain.

Ernest Hemingway's third child, Gloria Hemingway, was born a year later on November 12,1931, in Kansas City as "Gregory Hancock Hemingway".

Ernest Hemingway bought a boat in 1934, named it the Pilar, and began sailing the Caribbean.

In 1937, Ernest Hemingway left for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, despite Pauline's reluctance to have him working in a war zone.

Ernest Hemingway was joined in Spain by journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met in Key West a year earlier.

Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Ernest Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by Francoist forces.

Ernest Hemingway returned to Key West for a few months, then back to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and he was among the British and American journalists who were some of the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.

In early 1939, Ernest Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana.

Ernest Hemingway moved his primary summer residence to Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley, and moved his winter residence to Cuba.

Ernest Hemingway had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, but he became enamored of cats in Cuba and kept dozens of them on the property.

Ernest Hemingway's pattern was to move around while working on a manuscript, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley.

Ernest Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper PM, but in general he disliked China.

Ernest Hemingway was in Europe from May 1944 to March 1945.

Martha had been forced to cross the Atlantic in a ship filled with explosives because Ernest Hemingway refused to help her get a press pass on a plane, and she arrived in London to find him hospitalized with a concussion from a car accident.

Ernest Hemingway was unsympathetic to his plight; she accused him of being a bully and told him that she was "through, absolutely finished".

The last time that Ernest Hemingway saw Martha was in March 1945 as he was preparing to return to Cuba, and their divorce was finalized later that year.

Ernest Hemingway accompanied the troops to the Normandy Landings wearing a large head bandage, according to Meyers, but he was considered "precious cargo" and not allowed ashore.

Ernest Hemingway later wrote in Collier's that he could see "the first, second, third, fourth and fifth waves of [landing troops] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between the sea and first cover".

Mellow explains that, on that first day, none of the correspondents were allowed to land and Ernest Hemingway was returned to the Dorothea Dix.

In 1947, Ernest Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II.

Ernest Hemingway was recognized for having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions", with the commendation that "through his talent of expression, Mr Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat".

Ernest Hemingway said he "was out of business as a writer" from 1942 to 1945 during his residence in Cuba.

The Ernest Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he "smashed his knee" and sustained another "deep wound on his forehead"; Mary broke first her right ankle and then her left in successive skiing accidents.

However, both projects stalled, and Mellow says that Ernest Hemingway's inability to continue was "a symptom of his troubles" during these years.

In January 1954, while in Africa, Ernest Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes.

Ernest Hemingway chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary.

Ernest Hemingway's injuries included a head wound, while Mary broke two ribs.

The next day, attempting to reach medical care in Entebbe, they boarded a second plane that exploded at take-off, with Ernest Hemingway suffering burns and another concussion, this one serious enough to cause leaking of cerebral fluid.

Ernest Hemingway briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating and reading his erroneous obituaries.

In October 1954, Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ernest Hemingway modestly told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize, but he gladly accepted the prize money.

Ernest Hemingway grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.

Ernest Hemingway was told to stop drinking to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but then disregarded.

Author Michael Reynolds claims it was during this period that Ernest Hemingway slid into depression, from which he was unable to recover.

The Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Ernest Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho.

Ernest Hemingway was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and the following year for his 61st birthday; however, that year he and Mary decided to leave after hearing the news that Castro wanted to nationalize property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals.

Ernest Hemingway continued to rework the material that was published as A Moveable Feast through the 1950s.

Hotchner found Ernest Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused", and suffering badly from failing eyesight.

Ernest Hemingway set up a small office in his New York City apartment and attempted to work, but he left soon after.

Ernest Hemingway then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover of Life magazine.

Ernest Hemingway quickly took him to Idaho, where physician George Saviers met them at the train.

Ernest Hemingway became paranoid, thinking that the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum.

The FBI knew that Ernest Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961.

Ernest Hemingway was checked in under Saviers's name to maintain anonymity.

Ernest Hemingway was back in Ketchum in April 1961, three months after being released from the Mayo Clinic, when Mary "found Ernest Hemingway holding a shotgun" in the kitchen one morning.

Ernest Hemingway called Saviers, who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley Hospital and once the weather cleared Saviers flew again to Rochester with his patient.

Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Ernest Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961.

Ernest Hemingway's health was further complicated by heavy drinking throughout most of his life.

Henry Louis Gates believes Ernest Hemingway's style was fundamentally shaped "in reaction to [his] experience of world war".

Ernest Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface.

Ernest Hemingway often used bilingual puns and crosslingual wordplay as stylistic devices.

Ernest Hemingway uses other cinematic techniques of "cutting" quickly from one scene to the next; or of "splicing" a scene into another.

Ernest Hemingway habitually used the word "and" in place of commas.

Ernest Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always".

Ernest Hemingway's letters refer to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past several times over the years, and indicate he read the book at least twice.

Ernest Hemingway's writing includes themes of love, war, travel, wilderness, and loss.

Fiedler believes Ernest Hemingway inverts the American literary theme of the evil "Dark Woman" versus the good "Light Woman".

Baker believes Ernest Hemingway's work emphasizes the "natural" versus the "unnatural".

Susan Beegel reports that Charles Stetler and Gerald Locklin read Hemingway's The Mother of a Queen as both misogynistic and homophobic, and Ernest Fontana thought that a "horror of homosexuality" drove the short story "A Pursuit Race".

Ernest Hemingway's books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as being a monument of modern decadence", and disavowed by his parents as "filth".

Benson believes the details of Ernest Hemingway's life have become a "prime vehicle for exploitation", resulting in a Ernest Hemingway industry.

Benson agrees, describing him as introverted and private as JD Salinger, although Ernest Hemingway masked his nature with braggadocio.

The Kilimanjaro Device by Ray Bradbury featured Hemingway being transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, while the 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway explored the friendship of two retired men, played by Robert Duvall and Richard Harris, in a seaside Florida town.

Ernest Hemingway's influence is further evident from the many restaurants bearing his name and the proliferation of bars called "Harry's", a nod to the bar in Across the River and Into the Trees.

In 1977, the International Imitation Ernest Hemingway Competition was created to acknowledge his distinct style and the comical efforts of amateur authors to imitate him; entrants are encouraged to submit one "really good page of really bad Ernest Hemingway" and the winners are flown to Harry's Bar in Italy.

Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F Kennedy Library.

Ernest Hemingway's death was later ruled a death by suicide.