2 July 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies

Early in the morning of 2 July 1961, 61-year-old Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers sat in the foyer of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun. Hemingway was a boxer, a boozer, a philanderer, and a big-game hunter who wrote some of the most sublime prose of the English language: short, sharp, piercing sentences that told stories about soldiers, lovers, hunters, bravery, fear and death. He was also comfortable handling guns and rifles, having received his first shotgun from his father when he was only 10 years old.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a doctor. His mother was a talented but neurotic woman who dressed Ernest and his sister as little girls and tried to pass them off as twins.

Hemingway suffered from severe depression, paranoid delusions, severe head injuries, and bipolar disease aggravated by a history of alcoholism, and was troubled at the time he pulled the trigger. Medical records made available in 1991 prove that he was diagnosed with hemochromatosis just before he died. Hemochromatosis, an hereditary disease and easily treatable today causes the excessive accumulation of iron in body tissues causing mental and physical deterioration. However, in 1961, mental health was poorly understood, stigmatizing, rarely discussed and poorly treated. Seven of Hemingway’s close family relations died by suicide, including his father, sister, brother, and much later his granddaughter, the supermodel Margaux Hemingway.

Hemingway won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature for his simple and compassionate story, The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aged fisherman’s fight to land a giant catch, and “for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

His other works include In Our Time (1924), The Torrents of Spring (1926), The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927), Winner Take Nothing (1933), and To Have and Have Not (1937). Several of Hemingway’s most successful novels were made into motion pictures, including Farewell to Arms (1957), The Sun Also Rises (1957), and The Old Man and the Sea (1958).