21 July 1899: Ernest Hemingway is born

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.

At school, Hemingway was a good athlete, joined the school orchestra, and received good grades in English classes. Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist. After a short period of service as an ambulance driver at the WWI front in Italy, he was seriously wounded and returned home in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms.

In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. Working as a foreign correspondent in Paris, he fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s. Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. After his 1927 divorce from Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil (he as a journalist), and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. They separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II.

Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two plane crashes that left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961. 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.

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.”