Hemingway, Ernest Millar 1899-1961
US writer of novels and short stories, and Nobel Prize winner

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a respectable suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor and a keen sportsman who passed on his enthusiasm to his son, though he also inherited a melancholic, self-destructive personality. He was educated at grammar school and the palatial Oak Park and River Forest Township High School, where he distinguished himself only in English. His mother wanted him to become a violinist but, modelling himself on Ring Lardner, he was determined to become a journalist and a writer and got a job on the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter; there he was paid $15 a week and was given a copy of the style book which told him to write the simple declarative sentences that were to be characterstic of the mature Hemingway.

In April 1918 he resigned and joined the Red Cross, to be hurled into World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded. Returning to the USA he began to write features for the Toronto Star Weekly in 1919 and married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives, in 1921. That same year he went to Europe as a roving correspondent and covered several large conferences. In Paris he moved easily and conspicuously among other �migr� artists and came into contact with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F Scott Fitzgerald. A Moveable Feast (1964) records this time, reliving the struggle he and his new wife had to make ends meet. Three Stories and Ten Poems was given a limited circulation in Paris in 1923, and in 1924 he published In Our Time, which met with critical approval in America a year later. The Sun Also Rises (1926) and a volume of short stories, Men Without Women (1927), confirmed his reputation, and in 1928, divorced from Hadley and re-married to Pauline Pfeiffer, he moved to Key West, Florida.

Disentangling fact from myth in the years that followed is not easy. Drinking, brawling, posturing, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and bull-fighting all competed with writing. Nevertheless the body of Hemingway's work is impressive, if uneven. In 1929 he published A Farewell to Arms, and in 1932 the bull-fighting classic, Death in the Afternoon. Green Hills in Africa (1935) tells of tension-filled big-game hunts. Perhaps his most popular book is For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, about the Civil War in Spain to which he went as a journalist. He continued to work as a war correspondent during World War II, and in 1945 he settled in Cuba, where he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He cheated death more than once and had the strange pleasure of reading his own obituary twice; however he suffered from depression and shot himself in the mouth at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Bibliography: H S Villard and J Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War (1989); R E Hardy and J G Cull, Hemingway: A Psychological Portrait (2nd edn 1987); M Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (1986); S Donaldson, By Force of Will (1977); C Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969).