100 Facts About Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Hemingway served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918.

In 1921, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and was influenced by the modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community.

In 1928, Ernest Hemingway returned to the US, where he settled in Key West, Florida.

In 1937, Ernest Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, written in Havana, Cuba.

Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

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.

Grace Ernest Hemingway was a well-known local musician, and taught her reluctant son to play the cello.

Ernest Hemingway's father taught him woodcraft during the family's summer sojourns at Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan, where Ernest learned to hunt, fish and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan.

Ernest Hemingway went to Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park between 1913 and 1917, where he competed in 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.

Ernest Hemingway wanted to go to war and tried to enlist in the US Army but was not accepted because he had poor eyesight.

Ernest Hemingway spent six months at the hospital, where he met "Chink" Dorman-Smith.

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

In future relationships Ernest Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.

Ernest Hemingway's return home in 1919 was a difficult time of readjustment.

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

Two months later, Ernest Hemingway signed on as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and the couple left for Paris.

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 considered Toronto boring, missed Paris, 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.

The year before, Ernest Hemingway visited the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, for the first time, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.

Ernest Hemingway suffered a severe head 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 went to Kansas City, Missouri, where their son Patrick was born on June 28,1928, at Bell Memorial Hospital.

Pauline had a difficult delivery; Ernest Hemingway wrote a fictionalized version of the event in A Farewell to Arms.

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.

In Spain in mid-1929, Ernest Hemingway researched his next work, Death in the Afternoon.

In November 1930, after taking Dos Passos to the train station in Billings, Montana, Ernest Hemingway broke his arm in a car accident.

Ernest Hemingway was hospitalized for seven weeks, with Pauline tending to him.

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 purchased a boat in 1934, naming it the Pilar, and began to sail the Caribbean.

Ernest Hemingway arrived at Bimini in 1935, where he spent a considerable amount of time.

Ernest Hemingway had been following developments in Spain since early in his career and from 1931 it became clear that there would be another European war.

Baker writes that Ernest Hemingway did not expect Spain to "become a sort of international testing-ground for Germany, Italy, and Russia before the Spanish Civil War was over".

Ernest Hemingway had met her in Key West a year earlier.

Back in the US that summer, Ernest Hemingway prepared the soundtrack for the film.

On his return to Madrid Ernest Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by the Francoist army.

Ernest Hemingway went back to Key West for a few months in January 1938.

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

Ernest Hemingway followed the pattern established after his divorce from Hadley and moved again.

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.

Meyers writes that Ernest Hemingway had little enthusiasm for the trip or for China, Although his dispatches for PM provided incisive insights of the Sino-Japanese War according to Reynolds, with analysis of Japanese incursions into the Philippines sparking an "American war in the Pacific".

Back in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway refitted the Pilar as a Q-boat and went on patrol for German U-boats.

Ernest Hemingway created a counterintelligence unit headquartered in his guesthouse to surveil Falangists, and Nazi sympathizers.

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 prepared to return to Cuba; their divorce was finalized later that year.

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.

Ernest Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in 1947, in recognition for having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions".

Ernest Hemingway said he "was out of business as a writer" from 1942 to 1945.

The Ernest Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he injured his knee and sustained another head wound.

Mellow writes that Ernest Hemingway's inability to write was "a symptom of his troubles" during these years.

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

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

Ernest Hemingway assured them he could fly out, but the landing strip was too rough and the plane exploded in flames.

Ernest Hemingway had to smash his way out by battering the door open with his head.

Ernest Hemingway suffered burns and another serious head injury, that caused cerebral fluid to leak from the injury.

Ernest Hemingway briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating in Nairobi.

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 ordered to stop drinking so as to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but eventually disregarded.

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

Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Ernest Hemingway considered a permanent move to Idaho.

Ernest Hemingway was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and in 1960, for his 61st birthday.

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

Ernest Hemingway left Cuba for the last time on July 25,1960.

Ernest Hemingway was, in fact, seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown.

Ernest Hemingway quickly took him to Idaho, where they were met at the train station in Ketchum by local physician George Saviers.

Ernest Hemingway was concerned about finances, missed Cuba, his books, and his life there, and fretted that he would never return to retrieve the manuscripts that he had left in a bank vault.

Ernest Hemingway believed the manuscripts that would be published as Islands in the Stream and True at First Light were lost.

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

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

Ernest Hemingway called Saviers, who admitted Hemingway to the Sun Valley Hospital under sedation.

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, which exacerbated his erratic behavior, and his head injuries increased the effects of the alcohol.

The neuropsychiatrist Andrew Farah's 2017 book Ernest Hemingway's Brain, offers a forensic examination of Ernest Hemingway's mental illness.

Farah writes that Ernest Hemingway's concussions resulted in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which eventually led to a form of dementia, most likely dementia with Lewy bodies.

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

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

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

Ernest Hemingway tried to achieve conveying emotion with collages of images.

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, expatriation, wilderness, and loss.

In Ernest Hemingway's fiction, nature is a place for rebirth and rest; it is where the hunter or fisherman might experience a moment of transcendence at the moment they kill their prey.

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".

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.

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 granddaughter Margaux Hemingway was a supermodel and actress and co-starred with her younger sister Mariel in the 1976 movie Lipstick.

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