American writer, novelist and adventurer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for “The Old Man and the Sea” and in 1954, the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works include “The Sun Also Rises,” which established his reputation in 1926, “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” “Writing,” he said, “is alchemy, a blend of observation, experience, travel and imagination.” Hemingway remains one of the most emulated, mocked, reviled, revered and widely read American writers of the 20th century.
A “local” of Key West, Florida from April 1928 to December 1939, he left an indelible mark. Once a year there is a festival in his memory, a campy week that gives Hemingway fans an excuse to go on a bender and celebrate his birthday. There are always folks there to argue his contradictions: he glorified the kill but would not shoot an elephant because it was too majestic. He was a macho maniac but his posthumously published “Garden of Eden” was full of androgyny and gender-switching. He was a bigot and an anti-Semite but he sought, befriended and glorified the working underclass. He was a poseur, and a man of deeds.
In Cuba, where Hemingway made his home from 1939 to 1950, the ghost of Papa Hemingway is preserved as nowhere else. The decadent glamour may not be sustained in the Havana bar where he hung out but there are photographs displayed there as well as in any shrine. His villa is one of the world’s premier Hemingway museums, displaying many personal effects, including his Nobel Prize medallion.
Hemingway was raised in a stormy relationship with a mother who was often suffocatingly pious and self-righteous. She dressed him in girl’s frilly dresses and hats when he was a toddler. He left at 18 to begin his adventures and after his doctor-father committed suicide in 1928, he never returned to Oak Park. He referred to his boyhood home as a community of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” Nonetheless, he came from a family that sat around and told stories and as a boy, Ernest absorbed the adventures which he heard.
While serving in the Ambulance Corps in Italy, he was wounded by shrapnel on 8 July 1918. (He was in a car crash in Billings, Wyoming early morning of 7 April 1935, another in London on 20 June 1945, and another in Havana, Cuba on 1 July 1950. He was in two airplane crashes, the first at nightfall of 24 January 1954 in which he was severely injured, and a second plane crash, also in Uganda.)
After a brief stint at the Kansas City Star, Hemingway worked for the Toronto Star for three years, a journalist who covered every variety of story. On 31 December 1923, he left the Star, sailing from New York to Paris to work on “The Sun Also Rises.” He was 24 years old.
Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in 1920 when he was 21 and she, 29. They were a golden couple in a golden time. Ernest was the genius and Hadley his muse. It was a passionate love-match that ended when he had an affair with Hadley’s best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, who soon became the second Mrs. Hemingway. His third wife was Martha Gelhorn, 1940-1945, a marriage that he later called “his biggest mistake.”
In 1944 he met journalist Mary Welsh in Paris and they married two years later. She wrote free-lance articles and typed her husband’s letters and manuscripts. It was a passionate and turbulent 15-year adventure up to the time of his death. Over the years they lived in Cuba, Idaho, Florida and played in Spain, the Alps, the Caribbean and Africa. She was the keeper of her husband’s literary trust and reputation up to her death in 1986. His wives gave Hemingway three sons. Along with extramarital affairs, often unusual bed-partners, Hemingway had volatile relationships with men. He sought out older men as mentors and confidants, often turning on them savagely after they’d given him a helping hand. Warm, vibrant, often tender-hearted, he was also overbearingly macho. Theorists have proposed that he was threatened by his own repressed homosexuality but other writers feel that he was strongly in touch with his own female side. As a young man in Paris, his sex drive was so strong that he wrote of the need to make love three times a day, but he was also known to have bouts of impotence and a preference for athletic, androgynous women. Certainly he had enormous charm and magnetism. All of his life, Hemingway sought a masculine life of hunting, fishing and bullfighting, the wilderness, the sea, the road, the battlefield, free from the intrusive influence of women.
Obsessed with his own myth, Hemingway sank into the role of a boozy, bullying vindictive self-promoter, a professional legend. His fabled life started to unravel in 1960, when he began to suspect the FBI of putting him on their Most Wanted list. On 30 November 1960 he and Mary left their home in Ketchum, Idaho for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Suffering from paranoid delusions and high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a badly functioning liver, his depression was severe enough for electroshock treatments twice a week during December and early January. They gave him headaches and temporary amnesia. Finding himself unable to compose a simple inscription to a presentation volume for President Kennedy, he broke down in front of his doctor and cried that he could not write any more.
He was discharged on 22 January 1961 and flew back to Idaho, quiet and withdrawn. On 25 April, after a couple episodes that clearly pointed to the direction of suicide, he returned to Rochester for further treatment. They started the stressful drive back on June 26, taking five days to reach home.
The end came less than a month before his 62nd birthday. With his head as white and nearly as addled as Lear’s, Hemingway unlocked a full-choke Boss shotgun from its storage closet and leaned his forehead into both barrels. The man who was a legend in his own time died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds on 2 July 1961, Ketchum, Idaho.
Since his death, more than 500 books have been written about Ernest Hemingway and his works.
Link to Wikipedia biography