Ernest Hemingway

1899-1961
A Brief Biography
Michael Reynolds

orn in a Chicago suburb on July 21,1899, Ernest Hemingway

was a child of the twentieth century, responding to its every
pressure, recording its progress, and aging as it aged. His life
seemed to embody the promise of America: with good fortune,
hard work, talent, ambition, and a little ruthlessness a man can
create himself in the image of his choosing. As a young man in
Paris, Hemingway dedicated himself to his writing, and he let
nothing interfere with his goal, not parents nor wives, not friends
nor children. He created a public persona to match his prose, becoming the person he wanted to be. Like other self-made Americans, however, Hemingway's invented self was a mask that he
wore with less and less ease as he grew older. Despite this public
image, his raucous life and several wives, and the critics who
turned on him, he left stories and novels so starkly moving that
some have become a permanent part of our cultural inheritance.
Before he turned twenty-five Ernest Hemingway was already
friends with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, and he
had written most of the stories that were published as In Our
Time (1925). Before he was thirty Hemingway had buried his father (a suicide) and written two of the best novels to come from
his generation: The Sun Abo Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms
(1929). At thirty-six he reported the Spanish Civil War to neutral
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16 Ernest Hemingway
Americans. At forty-four he reported on the Normandy invasion
from a landing craft off Omaha Beach. At forty-six he married his
fourth wife. At fifty-three he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
and survived two plane crashes in Africa. At fifty-four the Nobel
Prize was his. On the morning of July 2,1961, Ernest Hemingway
slipped two shells into his favorite shotgun and quite deliberately
blew the top of his head away. He was survived by three wives,
three sons, numerous rumors, five unpublished books, and a distinguished if frequently misunderstood body of work.

The Oak Park Years: 1899-1917

Hemingway's birthplace, Oak Park, Illinois, sits four square on
the Illinois prairie, eight miles west of downtown Chicago,
where it was developed to hold at bay the corruption of the city.
With its insistence on constant vigil against corrupting forces,
the Village of Oak Park, as it called itself, put tremendous pressures on its sons and daughters. In the village of his youth, Hemingway was theoretically protected by city ordinances from uncensored movies, boxing matches, any information on venereal
disease or birth control, all forms of gambling and prostitution,
and all consumption of alcohol. Until he turned eighteen, Hemingway could not legally buy cigarettes, play billiards, drive a car,
or own a cap gun within the Village limits. Unless accompanied
by a parent or responsible adult, young Hemingway, governed by
the Village curfew, could not be out of the house after 8 P.M. in
the fall and winter, and after 9 P.M. in spring and summer. That
Hemingway rebelled against these pressures is not surprising; in
fact, had that first generation of this century not rebelled, it
would have been strange indeed.
Oak Park was a bastion of progressive Republicans, who
voted overwhelmingly for Theodore Roosevelt when he ran on
the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. Morally conservative, Oak Parkers
were equally zealous to have the newest and the bestnothing
was too modern for the Village except jazzy music and pool halls.
They had the most advanced city water system available, an extraordinary school system, and well-lighted streets. The Scoville

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17

Institute, which housed the large public library, was a continuous

source of visiting lecturers from the University of Chicago. Each
year the Chicago Symphony performed at least once in Oak
Park. Numerous clubs and civic organizations provided a steady
flow of ideas and entertainment. Hardly a week went by without
its musical evening, play, public lecture, or amateur minstrel
show. In those more innocent years before the Great European
War, Oak Park was self-contained, a world to which its sons returned from the earth's far corners to give magic-lantern lectures
on Africa, the Holy Land, and China. Its churches supported missionaries to Africa; no national disaster went without its Oak
Park drive to help the needy. It was a hometown about which
Hemingway, unlike most American writers, never wrote a single
story.
Ernest Hemingway grew up in the bosom of a well-known, extended, and respected family, college educated at Wheaton, Oberlin, and Rush Medical School, a family whose sense of civic responsibility was strong and whose interests were divided among
medicine, the Congregational Church, and real estate. Ernest's father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician. His grandfather Anson Hemingway helped develop the Chicago suburb; his
uncle George Hemingway continued the practice, dealing in real
estate, home insurance, and mortgages. Uncle Willoughby Hemingway was a medical missionary in China, returning periodically
with amazing presents and even more amazing tales from Asia;
Aunt Grace Hemingway was a storyteller on the Chautauqua circuit. Although Hemingway was sometimes embarrassed by his
mother's free spirit and frightened by his father's retreat into depressions, his early years were not scarred by divorce or abuse; he
grew up among his several sisters respecting his elders, submitting
to discipline, and behaving like a good bad boy.
With plenty of parental and community rules, it was easy to
be bad in Oak Park and just as easy to be forgiven, for the Hemingway name was a substantial one within the community. There
were nothing shabby about the two-story Hemingway house on
North Kenilworth, with its seven bedrooms, two full baths and
two half baths, a large music studio, a living room of comparable
size, dining room and kitchen, Dr. Hemingway's medical office,

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Ernest Hemingway

and a large screened porch. Ernest, along with his four sisters and
one brotherMarcelline (1898), Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904),
Carol (1911), and Leicester (1915)lived in a respectable neighborhood of businessmen, salesmen, doctors, and dentists who took
the train each morning into Chicago proper, where they worked,
returning each evening at supper.
In 1904 horses outnumbered automobiles 490 to 30 in Oak
Park. Within a few years the Village was bragging that it housed
more automobiles per capita than any other town in America.
John Farson, the town's wealthy banker, owned a Franklin, a
Packard, two Wintons, and a white Cadillac. In 1907 Dr. Hemingway's horse ran away down Oak Park Avenue, smashing his
buggy against a tree. When Ernest was twelve, his father still
made his rounds in a buggy. By 1914 the doctor was driving a
black Ford that was stolen from in front of the Municipal Building and recovered the next day in South Side Chicago. By 1912 the
Hemingway house on North Kenilworth was electrified and had
a telephone. Soon villagers who had grown up on farms were
complaining about smelly chickens and crowing roosters disturbing their lives. Times were changing.
In October 1913 Oak Parkers were horrified by the new, lascivious dances that had made their way into the country club
dances and once sedate living rooms:
The music of the bagnio finds its way to every piano, and our
young people habitually sing songs, words and music produced by degenerates. . . . Now the dance has come from
the brothel to take its place beside the nasty music and the sex
gown. Ever since the group dance gave way to the waltz, the
influence of the dissolute has been growing until now. . . .
We must go to South America and bring to Oak Park the
tango and the maxie. Everybody is "doing it, doing it" in the
words of one of our most popular songs. (Oak Leaves paper)
When Grace Hall-Hemingway, as Ernest's mother hyphenated her last name, designed their Kenilworth house, she included a music studio and recital hall thirty-feet square with a
vaulted ceiling and a narrow balcony. It 'was here that she gave

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19

music and voice lessons and scheduled her student recitals, and
where she composed and practiced her own music, which was
marketed by two different publishing houses. Today her lyrics,
mostly written for contraltos like herself, are as dated as the long
Victorian dresses that she wore until her death in 1951, but they
are no more sentimental than most turn-of-the-century popular
music. Incurably optimistic, she was the energy source in the
Hemingway household, a woman always on stage, a personality
that could not be ignored, a person, in fact, not unlike her eldest
son, Ernest.
In a village filled with amateurs, Grace was a professional musician whose classically trained skills became her identity and her
freedom. Wherever one went in Oak Park, Grace was singing by
invitation. At the Third Congregational Church she was chairperson of the music committee and directed the fifty children in
the vested choir and orchestra. After he left home, Hemingway
obscured his mother's talents and personality by professing to
hate her and to hold her responsible for his father's 1928 suicide.
Ironically, it was from his mother that Hemingway's boundless
energy and enthusiasm came. No one who met mother or son
ever forgot either of them.
When young Hemingway was not hearing his mother practice
her varied musical routines, or her students at her lessons, or himself on his cello, he was attending the annual high school student
opera where he and Marcelline were in the orchestra together for
two years. The impact of his musical training, both formal and casual, was long lasting. He continued to listen to classical music all
of his life. During his courtship of his first wife, Hadley Richardson, piano concerts were part of their shared interests; after their
marriage, Hadley replaced his mother at the piano that they
rented in Paris. Out of this background came Hemingway's compulsion to public performance and his understanding of counterpoint, which he used to advantage in his writing.
Balanced against the propriety and culture of Oak Park were
Hemingway's northern Michigan summers, where the family
cottage was on one side of Walloon Lake and, later, his mother's
farm on the other. Every July and August from his birth through
the summer of 1917, Ernest explored the woods, streams, and the

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Ernest Hemingway

lake. For the first twelve years his father was with him, teaching
him to hunt and fish, but after 1911, when Clarence Hemingway
began to retreat into his deepening depressions, the boy was left
to his own devices. Besides his several sisters for company there
were summer people in cottages like the Hemingway's all along
the lake, summer friends from Horton Bay and Petoskey, and the
last of the Ojibway Indians who lived in the woods close to Horton. Those summers of trout fishing, camping out, hiking, baseball games, and awakened sexuality were as important to the
education of young Hemingway as were his school years in Oak
Park.
Whatever else his culture taught him, young Hemingway
learned early that perseverance and winning were Oak Park virtues. The Village expected its sons and daughters to bring home
blue ribbons; a single loss made a football season mediocre. Like
his boyhood hero, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest was determined to
excel in physical activities: twice he ran the high school crosscountry race; twice he finished last. He played lightweight football
until his late growth got him on the varsity team his senior year.
Slow afoot and a little clumsy, he was a second-string interior lineman. He managed the swimming team, where his event was the
"plunge," swimming underwater for distance. He captained the
water polo team. When he got his height, he also got boxing
gloves. Later in Europe he look up tennis, skiing, and the luge. He
always admired professional boxers and baseball players and, later,
bullfighters.
In high school Hemingway took the then-standard pre-college
curriculum: six semesters of science, four of math, six of Latin,
eight semesters of English literature and composition, four semesters of history, two semesters of applied music, and another
two years of orchestra. In Latin, young Hemingway translated his
Cicero; in history he wrote essays on Greek tyrants and the
Marathon campaign and outlined the Punic Wars. In English
courses, all of which required weekly writing and the study of
composition, young Hemingway read the classic myths, Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, the British Romantics, Walter Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. He spent ten weeks studying the history of the

A Brief Biography

21

English language, four weeks on formal rhetoric, and an entire

semester of his senior year solely on prose composition. Along
with his classmates, Hemingway memorized the opening lines of
Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the thenstandard ration of Shakespeare soliloquies (Hemingway's Reading
1910-1940 39-43). Whatever the course, humanities or science,
there were always written assignments: weekly book reports, essays, and term papers. Hemingway outlined his reading of Macbeth and Hamlet and wrote reports on the anatomy of grasshoppers, the necessity of life insurance, the need for a standing army,
and the causes of the American Revolution.
Hemingway also wrote humorous pieces for the school newspaper and the literary magazine. "Bill 3127 Introduced by Senator
Hemingway" put the hunting of policemen under the game
laws, making it a misdemeanor to kill them out of season. And
like any Oak Parker, he could easily roll out his biblical parody:
It is written that in the Library thou shalt not chew gum.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's magazine orally. Thou
shalt not play tic tat-toe with Toots Johnson. Thou shalt not
match pennies with Reed Milliken. Thou shalt not throw
paper wads with Jim Adams. . . . Thou shalt not kid the
Jane that sitteth upon thy right hand, nor kick the boob who
sitteth across from thee, (Hemingway Collection, John F.
Kennedy Library, Boston [Kennedy Library])
In his high school translation of Cicero, Hemingway emphasized
three lines that might well have been his motto during those
years: "I pray Cataline to what point will you try our patience.
How long will you still mock our rage. To what limit will you
display your ungoverned insolence" (Hemingway Collection,
Kennedy Library).
Most of his courses required collateral reading in both the
high school library and the Scoville Institute. Besides required
texts, Hemingway also found time to read the books he enjoyed
at age sixteen, the short stories of O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling's
tales of empire, and Stewart Edward White's version of the
strenuous life. From the Scoville's collection, Hemingway bor-

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Ernest Hemingway

rowed books, particularly during the summer, and frequently

had late fees to pay. He may never have gone to college, but in
Oak Park he acquired the cultural background he needed for the
next step in his life (The Young Hemingway).

Early Journalism and the Great War: 1917-1921

In April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson, who had promised to
keep America out of the European war that had begun three
years earlier, asked Congress to make the world safe for democracy by saving those countries we now called our allies. That
June, Hemingway graduated from high school and spent his last
completely idyllic summer at Walloon Lake, where he turned
eighteen, still too young to enlist in the army. In October of that
year the Russian revolution overthrew Czar Nicholas and declared a separate peace with the Austro-Hungarian enemy. Late
that month the Austrians broke through the Italian alpine lines at
Caporetto, precipitating the greatest single defeat of the war.
That same month Ernest Hemingway, with help from his Missouri relatives, signed on as a cub reporter for the Kansas City
Star, where he said he "learned to write a simple, declarative
sentence."
Hemingway also learned the Star's style sheet: short first paragraphs, vigorous language, no superfluous words, few adjectives,
no trite phrases. For seven months young Hemingway covered
the usual beats assigned to raw recruits: city council, train station, police station, and hospital emergency room. By March 1918
he wrote home that "we are having a laundry strike here and I
am handling the police beat. The violence stories. [They are]
wrecking trucks, running them over cliffs, and yesterday they
murdered a non union guard. For over a month I have averaged a
column a day" (Hemingway Collection, Kennedy Library). The
romance of the newsman as crime fighter was part of what
pulled young Hemingway into journalism. Three years later he
would write nascent stories about a young reporter, Punk Alford,
solving violent crimes.
As eager as most American males of his age to experience the

A Brief Biography

23

Great European War, Hemingway joined the Missouri Home

Guard, which was eventually called to active duty. By that time
Hemingway was already in Italy, a volunteer ambulance driver
for the American Red Cross. After two weeks of limited action at
Schio, he volunteered to man a rolling canteen on the Piave River
front. There on the night of July 8, 1918, after barely a month in
the war zone, young Hemingway was blown up by an Austrian
trench mortar. He was not yet nineteen. All that summer and fall
he recovered from his leg wounds in the Milan Red Cross hospital, where his nurse was Agnes von Kurowsky, an attractive
young American woman eight years his senior. Although Agnes
found Ernest handsome and entertaining, their relationship
loomed larger in his mind than in hers. When he returned to
America on January 21, 1919, he thought they were engaged to be
married, but in March she wrote, breaking off whatever the relationship might have been, saying that she was far too old for him
(Hemingway's First War).
In January 1920, still limping from his war wound and trading
on his apprenticeship in Kansas City, Hemingway appeared at the
Toronto Star desk looking for part-time work. The city editor
agreed to buy Hemingway's stories on a piece by piece basis as
they suited the needs of the paper. This arrangement produced
Hemingway features on dental schools, prize fights, free shaves,
and trout fishing. (Dateline: TorontoThe Complete Toronto "Star"
Dispatches, 1920-1924). When Hemingway left Toronto in May
1920 to return to Chicago, his loose arrangement with the Star
remained in place; over the next twenty months the paper regularly printed Hemingway features on rum-running and Chicago
gangsters. During this same period, Hemingway was courting
Hadley Richardson, a St. Louis woman eight years older than
himself. They were married at Horton Bay on September 3, 1921,
and immediately began planning to move to Italy.
In Chicago the new couple enjoyed the company and storytelling of Sherwood Anderson, who advised Ernest that a wouldbe writer should go to Paris, not Italy. At the time, Hemingway
was churning out copy for the short lived Cooperative Commonwealth magazine for which he was editor, writer, and general factotum. The magazine soon went bankrupt in a scandal, leaving

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Ernest Hemingway

the Hemingways free to leave Chicago for Paris. Armed with

Sherwood Anderson's letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein,
Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach, Hemingway traveled as a special
correspondent to the Toronto Star, which allowed him to submit
features on a per piece basis and occasionally to work for weekly
wages and expenses while covering major European news events
(Young Hemingway). On January 9, 1922, he and Hadley moved
into an inexpensive, fourth-floor walk-up apartment in the heart
of Paris's Latin Quarter.

The Paris Years: 1922-1930

That first year in Paris, Hemingway had little time to work on his
novel begun in Chicago. Not only were there the distractions of
the city (galleries, cafes, racetracks, boxing matches) and the demands of newfound friends (Beach, Stein, Pound, Bill Bird), but
there were also the demands of his newspaper work. During a
twenty-month period in Europe, Hemingway filed more than
eighty-eight stories with the Toronto Star, all but a few of which
were printed. Between January 1922 and September 1923 the Star
printed Hemingway's submissions, which ranged from local
color ('American Bohemians in Paris a Weird Lot") to winter
sports ("Try Bob-Sledding If You Want Thrills") and the Great
War ("A Veteran Visits Old Front, Wishes He Had Stayed Away").
The Star also sent Hemingway to cover four important events:
the Genoa Economic Conference (Apr. 6-27, 1922), the brief but
intense Greco-Turkish War (Sept. 29-Oct. 21, 1922), the Lausanne
Peace Conference (Nov. 21-Dec. 15, 1922), and the French military
occupation of the German Ruhr (Mar. 3O-Apr. 9, 1923) (Dateline).
At the Genoa conference, Hemingway was an early witness
to the conflict between the fascist right and the Bolshevik left
that would dominate his century. "The Fascisti," he wrote,
"make no distinctions between socialists, communists, republicans or members of co-operative societies. They are all Reds and
dangerous" (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades 28). Less than a year later at Lausanne,
Hemingway described the new fascist dictator of Italy, Benito

A Brief Biography

25

Mussolini, as "the biggest bluff in Europe" (By-Line 64). There

was something permanently wrong, he said, with any man who
would wear a black shirt and white spats.
In September 1922 the Star sent Hemingway on a five-day
train trip to Constantinople, where he covered the short but violent Greco-Turkish War that culminated with the Turks burning
Smyrna and the Greeks retreating hopelessly from Thrace. He
wrote:
It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all they can
do to keep moving. ... A husband spreads a blanket over a
woman in labor in one of the carts to keep off the driving
rain. She is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the procession keeps moving. (Dateline 232)
These events began Hemingway's serious political education,
giving him a privileged view of the postwar political leaders
setting Europe's agenda: Clemenceau, Tchitcherin, Barthou,
Lloyd George, and Mussolini. He wrote about anarchists, antiSemitism, fascism, power politics, disarmament, German inflation, Paris nightlife, Spanish bullfights, and German trout fishing.
And wherever he went, he always told his readers how to live
well in another country: where to stay, what to eat, which wine
to choose, how to get the most for their money. While covering
the stories, Hemingway developed his admiration for the insider,
the experienced man who knows the language, food, and customs of the country. As a foreign correspondent, such expert
knowledge was expected of him; when he had it, he used it;
when he lacked firsthand experience, he pretended to it with
such ease that we later believed him to have written nothing that
was not autobiographical. This bilingual insider, adapt at European travel, became the trademark of his later fiction, which was
frequently set in a foreign country (Stephens 43-83).
Hemingway's short journalistic course in the sociopolitical aftermath of the Great War rubbed his Oak Park Republicanism
up against European socialism. The impact added to his sense of
being a man without a political home, a man more opposed to

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Ernest Hemingway

fascism than socialism but distrustful of all government. The experience also provided him with character types, themes, and images that would appear regularly in his fiction to the very end of
his life. Jake Barnes's journalism (The Sun Abo Rises), the socialist
subtext in A Farewell to Arms, Harry's story of Constantinople in
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Colonel Cantwell's return to the
site of his first wound (Across the River and Into the Trees), and the
Paris streets of A Moveable Feast are firmly rooted in Hemingway's Toronto journalism (Stevens 237-78, 362-77).
While covering the Lausanne Peace Conference in the early
winter of 1922, Ernest asked Hadley to join him for a vacation at
Chamby. Packing up most of her husband's Paris fiction, including the novel begun in Chicago, Hadley booked a seat on the
night train to Switzerland. While buying mineral water at the
station, she left her luggage unattended in her compartment. She
returned to find that a thief had stolen the valise containing
Ernest's writing. In tears, she arrived in Lausanne to face him
with what he later reconstructed as one of his most painful experiences. Evidence now indicates that it was less traumatic than he
remembered, for he apparently did not immediately return to
Paris to check with the police or the station lost and found; nor
did he post a meaningful reward (Hemingway: The Paris Years
84-104; Mellow). Shortly after he returned from Paris to Chamby,
Hadley became pregnant, and reluctantly they began talking of
moving back to a full-time newspaper job in Canada.
Despite the loss of his unfinished novel, Hemingway was not
deeply discouraged about his creative future. Two of his best
new stories"My Old Man" and "Up in Michigan"survived his
loss, and Ernest was committed to be part of Bill Bird's inquest
into the state of contemporary letters, edited by Ezra Pound. In
January 1923 six of his poems appeared in Poetry magazine; in
February Robert McAlmon agreed to publish a limited edition of
Ernest's poems and stories. By March, Hemingway had produced
six vignettes that he sent to Jane Heap's Little Review where, with
another of his poems, they were published the following October. In August, two weeks before their ship sailed for Canada,
McAlmon's edition of his Three Stories & Ten Poems appeared in
the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and Ernest finished

A Brief Biography

27

the last short sketches that would complete the book that Bill
Bird was to publish as in our time (1924). These "unwritten stories," as he called them, brought together what he had learned
from Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and his journalism. Some
came from direct experience; some were based on the experience
of others. Readers, then and later, were unable to tell the difference between the two types, which began the false notion that
Hemingway first lived the experience and then wrote about it.
All of his writing life, he insisted that his best writing was what
he made up, but readers refused to believe it.
Returning to Toronto, Ernest expected to be welcomed as the
Star's foreign correspondent. Instead, he found himself working
with a new editor, who generally disliked primadonnas and particularly disliked Hemingway. No sooner did Ernest report for
work than he was put on the night train to Kinston to cover the
prison break of four convicts, including the bank robber Red
Ryan (Paris Years 145-6). Two years later, while making notes for a
novel, Hemingway vowed to write a picaresque novel about
Ryan's escape from prison. "It will be the story of a tough kid,"
he said, "lucky for a long time and finally smashed by fate"
(Hemingway Collection, Princeton University Library).
Although he never wrote the Red Ryan novel, his next
fictionthe unpublished and unfinished "A New Slain Knight"
has a criminal breaking from custody and a central character
who is a professional revolutionary with criminal tendencies
(Homecoming 45-57). In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway gave us
the fishing guide turned criminal in Harry Morgan who is gutshot while killing three Cuban bank robbers. Many of his male
characters live lives apart from the social norm, men without
family, without homes, lonely, self-reliant men, men not so distantly related to Red Ryan.
Hemingway's first son, John Hadley Nicanor ("Bumby"), was
born that October in Toronto while Ernest was returning from
another out-of-town assignment. Furious with his editor, with
Toronto, and with his inability to write for two mastershimself
and the StarErnest quit his last full-time job in January 1924; he,
Hadley, and their son returned to Paris that same month to live on
her small trust fund and whatever money he could make writing.

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Ernest Hemingway

They found an inexpensive, cold-water flat above a saw mill, close

to Ezra Pound's apartment and near the heart of Montparnasse.
Later he would mythologize his early Paris years in A Moveable
Feast, insisting that he and Hadley were among the very poor on
the Left Bank. The Hemingways lived and dressed cheaply by design, saving their money for summer excursions to Spain and winters in the Alps. With the exchange rate of twenty-five francs to
the dollar, Hadley's reduced trust funds still produced enough for
them to live with some comforts, including their son's regular
nanny, who kept him during the Spanish summers.
With Ezra Pound as his mentor, Sylvia Beach as his friend, and
Gertrude Stein as his surrogate mother and godmother to his
son, Hemingway was as well connected as a young writer could
be. Pound persuaded him to work as an unpaid assistant for Ford
Madox Ford, who was then publishing the short-lived but important transatlantic review. From that vantage point, Ernest connected with every expatriate American writer in Paris. Through
Gertrude Stein's salon, he fell in love with Cezanne's landscapes
and met young painters on the rise-Juan Gris, Joan Miro, Pablo
Picasso. At Sylvia Beach's bookshop and lending library, he extended his education and his circle of acquaintances: George Antheil, Adrienne Monnier, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce.
Outwardly confidant, vibrant with energy, interested in everything and anyone, laughing and joking among his cafe friends,
young Hemingway became a featured attraction along the Americanized Left Bank of Paris. Continuously moving with his curious, slow-footed gait, he was a man on his way somewhere else,
always. He was six feet tall, broad shouldered, mustached, and
handsome, a man who set his own style. Whatever the activity
hunting, fishing, walking, or writinghe was intense and competitive. Whether it was the bullfights at Pamplona, the ski slopes
at Schruns, or an evening at a Paris dance hall, the Hemingway experience always demanded unexpected emotional resources. Few
of his male friendships lasted longer than five years, but to whatever he touched in those days he added scale and a sense of importance. Gerald Murphy said, "The lives of some of us will seem, I
suppose by comparison, piddling. . . . For me, he has the violence and excess of genius."1

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29

In 1925 Hemingway's first collection of short stories was published in America by the avant garde publisher Horace Liveright,
who published Sherwood Anderson and Harold Loeb, friends
of Hemingway. The collection, called In Our Time, used the
vignettes from in our time as counterpoints between stories, several of which became Hemingway classics. This collection, influenced by Joyce's Dubliners, staked out subject matter, perfected
techniques, and crystallized structures that Hemingway would
mine over the next ten years. Here he introduced his sometime
alter ego, Nick Adams, a young boy coming of age in northern
Michigan. In the last and anchor story in the collection, "Big
Two-Hearted River," almost nothing happens on the surface but
palpable subsurface tensions keep the reader riveted. These
stories"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,"
"The End of Something," and "Three Day Blow"were all written during the wonder year of 1924 and would eventually remake
the American short story, but not immediately. Liveright published only 1,100 copies of the book, which left Hemingway
deeply unhappy but legally committed to the publisher by his
contract, which specified that Liveright had first refusal on his
next three books.
In the early summer of 1925 Hemingway met the inventor of
the flapper and the high priest of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose novel, The Great Gatsby, had been recently published.
Fitzgerald, at the height of his powers, was already a great admirer of Hemingway's writing, having recommended him to his
editor at Scribner's, Max Perkins, on the basis of the in our time
vignettes. Delayed by wrong addresses and the transatlantic
mails, Perkins's letter to Hemingway arrived after he had accepted the Liveright contract. Determined to move Hemingway
to Scribner's, Fitzgerald probably planted the idea that if Hemingway wrote a book that Liveright could not accept, his contract
would be broken. That summer of 1925, after a conflicted feria at
Pamplona, Hemingway wrote the first draft of The Sun Also
Rises, which he finished in Paris that fall, but did not submit to
Liveright. Instead he quickly wrote The Torrents of Spring, a literary satire that made fun of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter,
recently published by Liveright. When Horace Liveright received

30

Ernest Hemingway

Torrents, he understood what Hemingway was trying to do; he

also was aware of Fitzgerald's meddling and the novel Hemingway had not submitted. Early in 1926 Hemingway confronted
Liveright in his New York office, insisting that Torrents was a serious book that Liveright must publish to get The Sun Also Rises.
Unable to afford to offend Anderson, Liveright declined, freeing
Hemingway to sign with Scribner's, who published Torrents that
May, followed in October by The Sun Abo Rises, which Hemingway called the pig Perkins bought in the poke.
Thus began Hemingway's lifelong relationship with Charles
Scribner's Sons publishing house and his relationship with Max
Perkins, whose tolerance and diplomacy Ernest would sorely test
over the years until Max's death in 1947. The breakthrough novel,
The Sun Abo Rises (1926), was followed by a second collection of
stories, Men without Women (1927), which contained two stories
"Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Killers"that were soon
anthologized in numerous collections and college textbooks,
ever widening Hemingway's dedicated audience. The collection
also pushed into taboo subject matter, which Hemingway explored obliquely, never naming the thing itself. "Hills Like White
Elephants" was about abortion, although the word is never mentioned. His subject mattera fixed championship boxing match,
a homosexual proposition, contract killers, divorce, and a disturbed war veteranchallenged the mores of mainstream fiction
and continued his lifelong insistence that there were no taboo
words, no forbidden subjects. But it would not be until after his
death in 1961 that the works of Henry Miller, for example, could
be printed in the United States.
Between 1924 and 1927 Hemingway rose from an undiscovered writer known only to the expatriate Paris crowd to become
one of the most promising young writers of his generation. This
newfound success was not without its costs. In April 1927 Hadley
divorced him, allowing him to marry Pauline Pfeiffer (May 10,
1927), with whom he had begun an affair more than a year earlier.
In his divorce settlement, he gave Hadley rights to all of the income from The Sun Abo Rises. Fortuitously, Pauline brought with
her a substantial trust fund that for the next thirteen years provided Hemingway with the means to live beyond his means.

A Brief Biography

31

The first substantial return on this investment was Hemingway's first bestseller, A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of an
American ambulance driver and a British nurse brought together
during the tumult of World War One. Destined to become the
premier American war novel from that debacle, the story of Frederic Henry's wounding, Catherine Barkley's unwedded pregnancy, the Italian disaster at Caporetto, the lovers' desertion of
duty, and Catherine's death in childbirth spoke to America's rejection of the war and its own political isolation during the 1920s. Because The Sun Also Rises was a roman a clef, readers assumed that
A Farewell to Arms was another installment in Hemingway's thinly
veiled autobiography. It would be almost half a century before
anyone would notice that Hemingway was not in Italy during the
Italian retreat from Caporetto (Hemingway's First War).

The Key West Years: 1930-1939

In 1928 Ernest and Pauline returned briefly to America for the
caesarean birth of his second son, Patrick. During this visit, they
discovered the then-isolated pleasures of Key West fishing and
Wyoming dude ranches. After spending most of 1929 in and out
of their Paris apartment, the Hemingways in 1930 moved back
to Key West, where Ernest began writing his vade mecum and
explanation of the bullfight, Death in the Afternoon (1932). On
November 1, 1930, while driving John Dos Passos from their
Wyoming hunting trip into Billings, Montana, to catch the eastbound train, Hemingway, confused by the lights of an approaching car, swerved sharply on a newly graveled road, ending up in
the bar-ditch with his right arm badly broken. The surgeon repaired the compound spiral fracture, binding Hemingway's
humerus together with kangaroo tendon. For the next seven
weeks, he was hospitalized in a great deal of pain. When Pauline
arrived, she brought him books, answered his mail, and slept in
the room with him, keeping his spirits from sinking lower. It was
almost a full year before Hemingway's right arm returned to
something like normal and the damaged nerves in his writing
hand repaired themselves.

32

Ernest Hemingway

During his seven-week hospital stay in Billings, the sale of the

film rights to A Farewell to Arms brought him a $24,000 windfall.
During the Great Depression, the Hemingways were supported
by Pauline's trust fund, gifts from her wealthy uncle Augustus
Pfeiffer, who paid for their home in Key West and their African
safari, and by income from Hemingway's writing. For the last
thirty years of his life, that income was richly supplemented first
by Hollywood and later by television. During his lifetime, the
film sales from five of his novels and numerous short stories gave
him an independence enjoyed by few American writers.
While the American economy wallowed in the worst economic depression of modern times, Hemingway experimented
freely with genre, voice, and subject matter, going ten years before writing anything like a traditional novel. Death in the Afternoon, with its multiple voices, its stories within the narrative, and
its factual framework, was a book before its time; unclassifiable,
it was and remains largely ignored as a text by Hemingway critics
but is pilfered freely for its pithy quotes. This non-fictive, natural
history of the bullfight was, in fact, the sort of book that Hemingway's early interests in the natural world had prepared him to
write. Hemingway, like many another American writer, was
troubled by the idea of writing fiction, whose very definition included the sense of telling lies. Despite his insistence that he invented stories that told truths, he was never completely comfortable as a fictionalist only and preferred to write in several
different modes and genres, which he did despite Scribner's appetite for his novels.
In 1933 Hemingway published his third collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing, which was even more abrasive to the
prevailing American moral view of itself. When two young boys
walk into the train station in "Light of the World," they are confronted by five whores and a homosexual cook, with whom anyone can "interfere." In "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," we
read a Christmas Day story in which a young boy emasculates
himself with a razor to avoid sins against purity. Other stories involved homosexuality, insanity, suicide, nihilism, and veneral disease. In the anchor story, "Fathers and Sons," Nick Adams, now a
father, finds he is no more capable of speaking truthfully to his

A Brief Biography

33

son than was his own father a generation earlier. To a reading

public mired in the economic woes of the Depression, this collection of stories offered no significant hope and no exit.
Winner Take Nothing was followed two years later by Hemingway's semi-nonfictional account of his 1933 African safari, Green
Hills of Africa (1935). Mixing humor, flashbacks, literary pontification, and self-exposure with his fable on aesthetics, Hemingway
once again wrote outside the reception range of the critics. In
1936 he published his most experimental short story, "The Snows
of Kilimanjaro," which contained a collection of vignettes similar to those of in our time embedded in a larger story. Written in
tandem with what was to become his most popular short story
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"Hemingway
presented, among other things, two contrasting views of American men and women.
During this period (1933-1936) Hemingway was also writing a
series of personal essays, called "Letters," for the newly founded
Esquire magazine. This forum allowed him to create a public persona that became as well known as that of many movie stars. His
subject matter was himself in situ: Africa, the Gulf Stream, Paris,
Spain, Cuba, Key West, wherever his interests took him. The
voice was personal and frequently humorous, combative, or
prophetic. In September 1935 he warned his audience about the
next war, which he said would begin within two years. In September 1937 he was in Madrid reporting on the Spanish Civil War.
That October, Hemingway was on the cover of Time magazine, and his last experimental work from the Key West years, To
Have and Have Not, was published to tepid reviews. What had
begun as two stories about Harry Morgan, a Key West fishing
guide and rum runner, expanded in the planning stage to be
a complex novel comparing a Cuban revolution with a parallel
revolution in Spain. The book he intended to write was abandoned, the revolutions reduced to a whisper, and the remainder
cobbled together as well as he could.
The author was under self-imposed pressure to reach the
newly begun Spanish Civil War, as well as pressure to find a safe
haven for his recently begun affair with the twenty-nine-year-old
Martha Gellhorn. With Pauline confined to Key West with their

34

Ernest Hemingway

two sons, Patrick and Gregory, what safer place to conduct a love
affair than Madrid under seige. The immediate results were his
journalistic coverage of the war for the North American News
Alliance and the short-lived Ken magazine; a film, The Spanish
Earth, to which he contributed narrative; and his only play, The
Fifth Column (1938), in which the counterintelligence agent Philip
Rawlings says that the world is in for fifty years of undeclared
wars and that he has signed up for the duration.
In February 1939, with his marriage to Pauline over in all but
name, Hemingway took his fishing boat, the Pilar, to Havana,
Cuba, where he took his favorite room in the Hotel Ambos Mundos and began writing what would be received as his finest novel,
For Whom the Bell Tolls. In April, Martha Gellhorn rented and made
habitable property outside of Havana, La Finca Vigia, where she
and Ernest set up their writers' workshop. Ernest worked steadily
on his Spanish Civil War story of the American dynamiter Robert
Jordan and his epic task of destroying the bridge behind Republican lines, a story he earlier intended to use in To Have and Have Not.
Martha, who had seen almost as much of Spain as Ernest, wisely
chose to write instead about her recent stay in Prague as it prepared to face the approaching Nazi invasion.
On December 24, 1939, Hemingway left his empty Key West
house for the last time as Pauline's husband. Taking with him
eight hundred books and his personal belongings, including several paintings by Miro, Leger, and Juan Gris, he moved permanently into La Finca, his penultimate residence. In Europe,
Hitler's blitzkrieg had overrun Poland; the war Hemingway had
predicted had begun, but America was not yet a part of it. That
March, Martha's new novel, dedicated to Ernest, was published
as A Stricken Field, the title taken from a pseudo-medieval quote
written for her by Hemingway. That same month, The Fifth Column, rewritten for the stage, opened in New York with mixed
reviews.
By the end of July 1940 Hemingway delivered his completed
typescript of For Whom the Bell Tolls to Max Perkins. On October 21 the novel appeared to ecstatic reviews; four days later
Paramount Pictures offered Ernest $100,000 for the film rights.
On November 4 Pauline's divorce suit against her husband on

A Brief Biography

35

grounds of desertion was granted, leaving Ernest free to marry

Martha Gellhorn on November 21. By the end of 1940 German
troops occupied a fallen Paris; Japanese troops were in Hong
Kong. The Battle for Britain had begun, and German submarines
were turning the North Atlantic into a shooting gallery. On the
homefront, Roosevelt had been reelected to an unprecedented
third presidential term, and Scott Fitzgerald was dead from a
heart attack. Just as the roar of the 1920s was put out by the
Great Depression, the economic moaning of the 1930s was silenced by what we would call the Second World War.

The Cuban Years: 1940-1959

While the last two decades of Hemingway's life produced seven
volumes of fiction and nonfiction, these years remain the murkiest and the least understood by his literary biographers. The first
five years of this period were subsumed by Hemingway's various
war efforts. Cuba, ruled by the dictator Batista, was a haven for
spies and intelligence agencies of every stripe. When Germany
declared war on the United States following the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, German submarines operated freely up and down the Atlantic coast and throughout the
Caribbean, sinking freighters and oil tankers at will.
All that summer of 1942, while Ernest was rearranging the
contents and writing the introduction for Men at War, the war
was close at hand, but he had no way to go to it. Too old for the
draft, too controversial for the government, and too far from Key
West, he had few options. In April the U.S. Marines at Bataan surrendered to the Japanese army, the worst U.S. military humiliation since the Sioux destroyed Custer. In May the German plan of
Admiral Doennitz, Operation Drumbeat, began its attack on the
American pipeline of war materiel flowing to England and Russia. Knowing how crucial oil, gasoline, and aviation fuel were to
fighting a war, the German U-boat commanders focused on
three refining centers: Aruba in the Caribbean and New Orleans
and Houston in the Gulf of Mexico. Knowing that without bauxite, there was no aluminum, and without aluminum, no air-

36 Ernest Hemingway
planes, the German raiders also centered on the British and
Dutch Guianas, which then produced most of the ore in the
western hemisphere.
The evening of February 16 was calm and warm at the entrance to Lake Maracaibo, where Venezuelan crude oil came
across the bar in shallow draft tankers to be refined at Aruba. At
the Lago refinery on Aruba, the graveyard shift came to work
with the nightlights fully lit and flare gas burning. Each month
this refinery, the world's largest, was producing 7 million barrels
of gasoline, aviation fuel, and lubricants, most of which was
going to support the British war effort. At 1:30 A.M., in a coordinated attack, German U-boats turned seven tankers into burning
hulks, shelled the refinery with surface guns, and left without a
scratch on their gray hulls. Observing the smoking ruins the next
morning, the Chinese crews refused to sail without protection,
forcing the refinery to shut down and Lake Maracaibo oil production to stop, having no more storage space. Nineteen ships
went down that month in the Caribbean; nineteen more the next
month; eleven in April; thirty-eight in May. Between February
and November 1942, almost twice as many ships were sunk in
this confined area than were sunk on the North Atlantic convoy
routes. By the end of November 1942, 263 were on the bottom of
the Caribbean Sea.2
While tankers were going down all around the island of
Cuba, the new American ambassador, Spruille Braden, became
worried about the loyalties of the 300,000 Spanish residents of
Cuba, as many as 10 percent of whom were thought to be dedicated Falangists and therefore potential sources of aid to the
Nazi cause. Until the FBI could find the right men for the Havana
station, Braden recruited Hemingway to organize a makeshift intelligence service, an assignment that Ernest accepted enthusiastically. As Braden remembered it, Hemingway
enlisted a bizarre combination of Spaniards: some bar tenders; a few wharf rats; some down-at-heel pelota players and
former bullfighters; two Basque priests; assorted exiled counts
and dukes; several Loyalists and Francistas. He built up an excellent organization and did an A-One job.3

A Brief Biography

37

Although Martha and others thought the "Crook Factory" something of a joke, Ambassador Braden thought Ernest's reports on
the activities of Spanish Falangists in Cuba significant enough to
include them almost verbatim in several long reports to the State
Department.4 The crucial diplomatic question was what would
Cuba do if Franco's Spain joined the Axis in the war, a very real
possibility given the German-Italian support of Franco's successful rebellion. In October 1942 Spruille Braden's cogent review of
the Cuban situation documented the Spanish Embassy's clandestine support of the Falange, which was generating Axis rumors
and propaganda. There was also the strong possibility that the
Falangists were gathering information on military installations,
communicating with and refueling German U-boats, and planning and executing "attempts at sabotage." Despite being outlawed by the Cuban government, the pro-Nazi Falange was both
active and dangerous to American interests.5
Ernest's long-standing fascination with spies and counterspies
was, for this brief period, completely in synch with prevalent
American war fears. We were a nation on edge, expecting the
worst. When crude sound detection gear picked up what seemed
to be two flights of unidentified aircraft, the entire San Francisco
Bay area was blacked out all the way to Sacramento for almost an
hour. When Jacob Steinberg's lights failed on the Williamsburg
Bridge, he made the mistake of stopping his truck. Unable to fix
them, he continued on toward his Brooklyn home, never hearing
the warning whistle from the soldier on guard duty at the bridge.
Jacob did hear the five warning slots, however, one of which flattened a tire, another almost hitting him. In Indiana the Civilian
Defense Headquarters was asked by a county official, "Would it
be possible to have a bomb dropped in our county to have the
people realize this country is at war?" He was told, "We're saving
all bombs for Tokyo."6 On June 13 the fears became a reality
when a Nazi U-boat landed four saboteurs on the south shore of
Long Island. Four days later another group of German agents
was put ashore close to Jacksonville, Florida. On June 27 J. Edgar
Hoover, head of the FBI, called a late evening news conference to
announce that all eight agents were under arrest, their caches of
explosives recovered, and the safety of the nation for the mo-

38

Ernest Hemingway

ment assured. Their objectives, he said, were the bridges leading

into Manhattan, three major aluminum plants, the New York
City water supply, the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, and
key rail centers. Shortly after noon on August 7, six of the eighth
German agents were executed in a portable electric chair installed at the District of Columbia jail.7 By the time the saboteurs
were dead, 250 enemy aliens, many of them naturalized American citizens, were in jail, charged with various subversive goals,
most particularly blowing up the Pennsylvania Railroad's horseshoe curve outside of Altoona.8 And the British-Honduran businessman suspected of refueling German U-boats in the Caribbean and smuggling spies into the Panama Canal Zone was
arrested by the U.S. Navy at sea.9
With its large international population, its critical location,
and its long history of revolutionary activity, Cuba was not immune to the war fears on the mainland. In April the Havana Post
reported that "almost fifty German, Italians and Japanese were
rounded up and arrested in a swift and simultaneous action by
agents of the Enemy Activities Section of the Cuban Bureau of
Investigation . . . [charged with] espionage and other illicit activities on behalf of the Axis powers . . . most of those arrested are on the U.S. blacklist." Among those arrested were several associated with the German spy ring at Nuevitas, "from
which port several freighters have departed during recent weeks
and been later sunk by enemy subs off the Cuban coast.10 On
July 14, as Hemingway's "Crook Factory" was being formed, the
FBI sent Raymond Leddy to the Havana embassy as an attache to
replace the FBI agent who could not "tell fact from rumor."11
By the first of May the submarine threat was so intense in the
Gulf of Mexico that all shipping was stopped along the north
coast of Cuba until convoys could be established.12 Seventeen
days later, a further order came down: "Movements are stopped
between Gulf or Caribbean ports and U.S. Atlantic Coast . . .
and from Gulf and Caribbean ports to east coast of South
America."13 In those first eight months of 1942, when attack
ships and planes were few and their crews inexperienced with
new electronic gear, U-boat commanders were earning Iron
Crosses on every trip west. Although Havana and other Cuban

A Brief Biography

39

ports did not contribute to the tanker traffic, the island, which
barricaded a major section of the Gulf, had primary shipping
lanes on all sides. In June and July of 1942, more than thirty ships
were torpedoed within easy reach of the Cuban coast. Cuba was
no longer an American protectorate, and the coming of war put
its neutrality in a precarious position, which quickly resolved in
its own best interests by declaring war against the Axis powers
and cooperating with the U.S. anti-submarine efforts. Small tent
outposts were established quickly on remote islands and keys off
the north coast to support Sykorzky seaplanes and to act as supply bases when Anti-Submarine Warfare cutters were in the area.
By mid-April Army Air Force planes using bases in Cuba were patrolling the Yucatan and Old Bahama Channels by day and later
by night.
Initially undermanned and out-planned, the United States did
what Americans have always done best: it improvised solutions
with whatever materials were at hand. Less than a month into the
war, the Coast Guard began organizing East Coast yachtsmen and
small boat owners into auxiliary units. Larger private sail and
motor driven ships were "rented" at a dollar a year for submarine
patrols in coastal waters.14 In late June, with shipping being sunk
at unsustainable rates, the navy took desperate measures:
Washington, June 27 (AP)In a move to put a great fleet of
small boats into the war against submarines off the Atlantic
and Gulf coasts, the navy called today for all owners of seagoing craft to volunteer their services of themselves and their
vessels. . . . Approximately 1,200 small boats are in such service now . . . [and] it is hoped that upward of 1,000 additional small boats for offshore navigation may be added to the
auxiliary. . . . Boats found to be qualified will be equipped
with radio, armament and suitable anti-submarine devices as
rapidly as possible.15
In July the recruitment for the auxiliary patrol was intensified.
Secretary of the Navy Prank Knox issued a call for "patriotic
yachtsmen and small-boat owners" to come to the aid of their
country, offering them

40

Ernest Hemingway

the opportunity which they have been so earnestly seeking: to

serve their country and combat its enemies in the sea-going
manner for which their experience fits them. . . . These
boats are needed right nownot only for ... Harbor Patrol duties but for actual offensive operations against enemy
submarines.16
By the time Secretary Knox issued his plea, Ernest Hemingway's
private war against the U-boats was well under way.
From his reading about Q-Ships, as they were called in World
War One, Ernest saw immediately the possibilities for the auxiliary force the U.S. Navy was recruiting. If a small and secretly
armed ship could lure a German submarine to the surface, it
might be able to get in the first shot, crippling the raider.17 Early
in the war, German submarines operating in the Caribbean and
the Gulf of Mexico were, in fact, liable to attack on the surface,
using their deck guns to conserve torpedoes. The long range
Type-XY U-boat common in the Gulf was formidably armed for
surface combat: a primary 1O5-mm. deck gun, a 37-mm. auxiliary
gun, and two 2o-mm. machine guns.18 On May 2 Ernest read in
the local paper of a running battle between a lightly armed
tanker and a U-boat off the north coast of Cuba. Attacking on
the surface with its deck gun, the submarine sank the tanker after
a two-hour exchange of fire.19
While his "Crook Factory" continued to collect counterintelligence on Falangists and German nationals in Cuba, Hemingway
was busy outfitting the Pilar as an armed patrol boat. On November 2, 1942, Hemingway reported to Colonel Boyden at the U.S.
Embassy that he and his crew were prepared to leave for a shakedown cruise no later than November 11, providing all the "materials" required arrived in time. The pirate-black hull and newly
painted dark green deck of the Pilar were being taken out of the
water for anti-fouling paint and a new stern bearing, but in four
days it would be ready for outfitting. It was vital, Hemingway
said, that the training exercises with guns, grenades, and satchel
charges be conducted in an area to the east of Havana if their
first armed patrol was going to be along the West Coast.20 On
November 2,0 Hemingway; Winston Guest; Gregorio Fuentes,

A Brief Biography

41

the cook and most experienced sailor; Pachi, the jai alai bomb
thrower; and two other Cubans passed under the battlements
guarding Havana harbor, moved out into the Gulf Stream, and
turned eastward on their first patrol. For the next twelve months,
the Pilar conducted several patrols, mostly in the Old Bahama
Channel on Cuba's eastern edge. Although never able to attack a
sub, Hemingway's crew performed needed patrol duties, including checking inlets, bays, and unhabited islands for signs of German activity.
Drinking heavily and arguing with Martha whenever he was
in port, Hemingway was suffering through the longest hiatus he
had ever experienced in his writing career. Since finishing For
Whom the Bell Tolls thirty months earlier, he had written nothing
but an introduction for Men at War (1942). During this same period, Martha had published a short story collection, The Heart of
Another (1941), and begun her next novel, Liana (1944), which she
finished in June 1943. All that year and into 1944, Hemingway
stayed in Cuba, where he returned to his self-appointed submarine patrols and wrote nothing. At the end of 1943 Martha left the
Finca to cover the European war for Collier's magazine; she urged
her husband to come with her. He brooded alone at the Finca,
where his typewriter continued to gather dust until 1945. At the
peak of his career, the foremost American male novelist went six
years without writing any new fiction. Only later would he recognize this hiatus as the onset of the severe depression that
would eventually destroy Hemingway just as it destroyed his father before him. By this point, the Hemingway-Gellhorn marriage was finished in all but name. In April 1944 Ernest signed on
as a war correspondent for Collier's, displacing Martha; by the
end of May, he had met Mary Welsh Monks, his fourth wife to
be, and Martha had closed the door behind her.
Between June and December 1944 Hemingway covered the
European war with manic energy, deliberately putting himself in
dangerous situations. On D-Day, June 6, rather than observe the
Normandy landing from the relative safety of the correspondents' ship, Hemingway went aboard a landing craft to get a
closer view. The result was his essay, "Voyage to Victory," which
remains vintage Hemingway:

42

Ernest Hemingway

I saw a ragged shell hole through the steel plates forward of

her pilothouse where an 88-mm. German shell had punched
through. Blood was dripping from the shiny edges of the hole
into the sea with each roll of the LCI. Her rails and hull had
been befouled by seasick men, and her dead were laid forward
of her pilothouse. (By-Line 351)
At the end of that month, he flew twice on Royal Air Force missions intercepting German rockets headed for England. In July he
was attached briefly to George Patton's Third Army before transferring to Colonel Charles "Buck" Lanham's Twenty-Second Division of the Fourth Army. By August, when Collier's published
"London Fights the Robots," Hemingway was leading a small
group of French irregulars and unattached GIs toward the liberation of Paris and the Ritz Bar.
In and out of Paris all that fall, Hemingway alternated between the battlefields of France and the bedroom of the Ritz
Hotel, where his affair with Mary Welsh Monks was proceeding
as well as the war effort. When he was not sick with colds and
sore throats or suffering with recurring headaches from a severe
concussion he sustained in London, Hemingway was by turns
brave, gentle, obsessive, foolhardy, loving, and brutal: a man surfing along the edge of his manic drive. That fall Collier's published
his two essays, "Battle for Paris" and "How We Came to Paris."
On October 8 a U.S. Army court-martial cleared Hemingway of
conduct forbidden to correspondents as non-combatants, conduct like carrying weapons, shooting Germans, and behaving
like a field officer. Under oath, Hemingway lied about his field activities prior to the liberation of Paris, lies for which he suffered
deep remorse (Hemingway Collection, Kennedy Library).
On November 15, 1944, Hemingway rejoined Lanham's
Twenty-Second Division for nineteen days of the bloodiest fighting he or anyone else saw during the war. On the GermanBelgium border, in rolling, thickly forested hills cut by muddy
logging roads, the German defense had prepared thick bunkers,
thousands of mines, and heavy artillery zeroed in on all crossroads. In snow and winter mud, both sides suffered incredible casualties under the worst conditions. It was here that Hemingway

A Brief Biography

43

verifiably killed a German soldier who was charging across the

clearing toward Lanham's command post. Attack and counterattack finally left 33,000 American troops killed, wounded, or missing in the action they called Hurtgenwald. That Hemingway survived this battle was more a matter of chance than of caution on
his part (Hemingway Collection Kennedy Library).
Sick, weary, his speech slurred from concussion, and his
memory temporarily damaged, Hemingway had seen enough of
the war. He returned to New York and then to Cuba, where Mary
Welsh Monks joined him in May. The following month Hemingway wrecked his car, cutting Mary's face while breaking four of
his ribs and reinjuring his head. That summer of 1945, as the war
on both fronts came to an end, Hemingway began putting his
writing life back together, working on what he said would be his
"trilogy." In September he filed an uncontested suit for divorce
from Martha on the grounds of her desertion. In November a
$112,000 sale of movie rights to two short stories provided him the
financial freedom to write without pressure to publish. Through
the remainder of his life, sales to Hollywood and to the fledgling
television industry kept him financially secure.
On March 14, 1946, Ernest and Mary Welsh, both recently divorced from other mates, were married in Havana. By mid-June
he claimed to have finished 1,000 pages on a new novel; by December he said it was 1,200 pages but would not be finished for
several months. For the first seven months of 1947 Hemingway
remained in Cuba, writing steadily through March. On June 17
Max Perkins died suddenly in New York; in August, Hemingway,
morose, overweight, and ears buzzing, was diagnosed with high
blood pressure. From this point to his death, he was to fight a
holding action against hypertension, diabetes, depression, paranoia, and perhaps hemochromatosismany of the same problems that led to his father's suicide and would, years later, lead to
his younger brother's suicide.
The Hemingways spent that fall and winter of 1947, as they
frequently would, hunting game birds in and around Ketchum,
Idaho. Returning to Cuba in February, Hemingway continued
writing on what may have become Islands in the Stream. Because
the bulk of his work during these later years was unpublished by

44

Ernest Hemingway

the author, and because he seems to have been working simultaneously on what we later received as discrete texts that he saw as
a trilogy (Islands, Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast), nothing definitive can yet be said about this period's texts. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that these three posthumous texts,
mixing fact and fiction, engage thematically the role of the artist
in modern times and have at their core, for good or ill, the experience of Paris in the 1920s. It was to be a trilogy unlike any other,
bringing to closure the experiments begun in Paris twenty-five
years earlier. Because these posthumous publications were edited
by three different editors, one of whom's credentials included
knowing nothing about Hemingway, neither the general reader
nor most scholars yet have access to the texts as Hemingway
wrote them.
From September 1948 through April 1949 Ernest and Mary
lived in northern Italy, principally Venice and Cortina, and visited
sites from Hemingway's first war. Nostalgic returns to previously
good places became a feature of Hemingway's later yearsItaly,
Pamplona, Africa, Parisand each return was less than happy. In
Italy, between duck hunting in the Venetian marshes and skiing
in the Dolomites, Hemingway met and became infatuated with
an eighteen-year-old Venetian beauty, Adriana Ivancich. Mary
tolerated her husband's behavior with what grace she could
manage. In January, Mary broke her leg skiing, and in March,
Hemingway's eye, infected with erysipelas, put him in the Padua
hospital. Before they returned to Cuba at the end of April, Hemingway had begun the story of a Venetian duck hunt.
For six months at the Finca, Hemingway, having put aside
his trilogy, used the duck-hunt story as a framing device for a
novelAcross the River and Into the Trees. Aaron Hotchner, acting as Hemingway's sounding board and agent, negotiated an
$85,000 price for the novel's serial rights. Hemingway took Mary,
Hotchner, and the manuscript back to Paris, where he finished
the story in a hotel room at the Ritz. Just before Christmas
1949, the group drove through the south of France, revisiting,
among other places, Aigues Morte and Grau-du-Roi, where
Ernest and Pauline once honeymooned. The Hemingways spent
two months in Venice before returning to Paris and eventually to

A Brief Biography

45

Cuba early in April. There Hemingway revised the book galleys

for Across the River; in September the courtly love story of the
dying American colonel and the teenage Venetian beauty received overwhelmingly negative reviews. By the end of 1950 Adriana and her mother were visiting at the Finca, where Hemingway finished Islands in the Stream and may have begun The Old
Man and the Sea. Mary, reduced to household drudge and the object of her husband's ridicule, wanted out of her marriage but
did not act on her feelings.
Fifty-one years old, sicker than most knew, and eleven years
without a successful novel, Ernest Hemingway seemed to have
reached the end of his career. Would-be biographers and scholars were in general agreement that this was the end of the line.
Meanwhile, in a two-month burst of writing, Hemingway completed the first draft of The Old Man and the Sea and returned to
add Thomas Hudson's last sub chase to the Islands manuscript,
which he declared finished in May 1951. What was looking like a
banner year turned to sorrow when Grace Hall-Hemingway died
at the end of June and Pauline Hemingway, after a violent phone
argument with Ernest, died unexpectedly in October. These two
losses were followed by Charles Scribner's mortal heart attack in
February 1952.
Each of these deaths diminished Hemingway's reserves but
contributed to his art in ways that a writer can feel but not explain, refueling what seemed to be exhausted supplies. No matter how much he claimed to have hated his mother, he was ever
the dutiful son, caring for her financially, writing occasionally,
and telephoning her regularly. At the heart of him, he could not
avoid seeing her face in his mirror. In March, he began a story,
"The Last Good Country," in which the mother stoutly stands up
in authority in defense of her son. Pauline's death, coming on the
heels of his Grau-du-Roi revisit, took him back to the The Garden
of Eden manuscript. Charles Scribner's death may have been the
hardest of all to bear, for without him Ernest lost his last father
surrogate to whom he could take his work seeking approval. At
fifty-two and about to receive his greatest public adulation,
Ernest Hemingway was more alone than he had ever been in his
life.

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Ernest Hemingway

Life magazine, having paid $40,000 for the serial rights, published and sold five million copies of its September 1, 1952, issue
containing The Old Man and the Sea in its entirety. The Book of
the Month Club bought the novella, and Scribner's sold out its
5O,000-copy first run. Critics and readers delighted in the simple,
moving story of an old fisherman's losing battle with sharks over
the carcass of his giant marlin. In early April 1953 the film crew
arrived in Havana to begin filming Hemingway's pocket-sized
epic. In May, Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which had been denied his For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In June, with a sizable advance from Look magazine to do a series of articles on a return safari to the Serengeti, Ernest and
Mary left Havana for Europe and eventually Africa. Beginning
with the Pamplona feria, Hemingway returned for the first time
since 1931 to the Spanish bullfight circuit, which he and Mary followed for a month. By September they were in Kenya on safari
that did not end until January 21, when Ernest treated Mary to a
small-plane trip to see Africa from the air. Two days later at
Murchison Falls, the plane struck a telegraph wire and crashlanded. Newspapers worldwide banner headlined Hemingway's
death. Soon afterward, the Hemingway party, bruised but alive,
boarded another small plane, which crashed in flames on takeoff.
More death notices appeared, but Hemingway again survived,
badly injured internally and with serious burns. The couple returned to Venice to recuperate until Ernest was ready to drive
back to Spain in May. On June 6, 1954, they departed Europe for
Havana, where on October 28 Ernest received news that he had
been awarded the Nobel Price for Literature, but he could not
make the trip to Stockholm because of poor health.
Between 1955 and 1961 Hemingway's life alternated between
ever-shortening cycles of euphoric writing and paranoia-ridden
depression. His weight rose and fell alarmingly; his hypertension
worsened. Medication for his blood pressure exacerbated his depressions. The public did not see his vulnerability, but close
friends became increasingly concerned. Yet, when his health did
not prevent him, Hemingway wrote steadily on his trilogy. The
Garden of Eden expanded in several drafts, and he was now working alternately on A Moveable Feast. This pattern continued well

A Brief Biography

47

into 1958. In January 1959, when the Batista government was

brought down by the Castro revolution, Hemingway bought a
house in Ketchum, Idaho, where he could safely watch the revolution for which he had a good deal of sympathy.
During the summer of 1959 Hemingway returned to Spain to
cover for Life magazine the mano-a-mano bullfights of the young
Ordonez and the veteran Dominguin. All that summer and into
the fall, Hemingway's behavior became more erratic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. His mood shifts frightened Mary
and bewildered his male friends. That winter and into the next
year, Hemingway worked on his contracted 10,000-word feature
for Life magazine. By May 1960 he had written 120,000 words,
which he asked Hotchner to edit. Life paid $90,000 for the shortened version but printed only part of it.
When Hemingway insisted on returning to Spain during the
summer of 1960, Mary remained in New York. From Spain he
wrote her plaintive letters about his fear of cracking up. That November, under the care of his Ketchum doctor, Hemingway entered the Mayo Clinic to be treated for hypertension, an enlarged
liver, paranoia, and severe depression. He received extended
treatments of electroshock therapy before being released on January 22, 1961. By the end of April, after two suicide attempts, he
was back at Mayo for more electroshock. Discharged on June 26,
he was driven back to Ketchum, where on July 2, 1961, he
brought his story to its seemingly inevitable, sad conclusion. In
Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway's Old Lady is told that all stories, if followed far enough, end sadly, and that he is no true
writer who would tell you otherwise. The words could have
been put on Hemingway's tombstone.

Envoi
Ernest Hemingway took us with him to Africa, whose dark heart
beats deep within his writing in ways not always obvious. He
studied trout streams in several countries, studied Gulf Stream
marlin, studied Spanish bulls and African game. He studied the
flight of birds, the bends of rivers, and the flow of country. But

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Ernest Hemingway

what he studied first, last, and always was that strange animal, his
fellow man, rampant in his natural setting. Like his mother,
Ernest was an artist; like his father, he was a natural historian.
Like both, he found his calling in Oak Park. But like neither parent, he was a child of the twentieth century, born too late for the
frontier and too soon for outer space, leaving only that dark
country within himself to explore. Despite wives, children, wars,
injuries, mental and physical illness, and his strenuous life, Hemingway left, permanently embedded in our literary history, several of the finest short stories written in the twentieth century, at
least threepossibly fourmajor novels, and a writer's life carried out on an epic scale. His influential style has, at some point,
influenced most American writers of his time. That he selfdestructed affirmed his humanity. That he wrote as well as he did
promises his permanence.
NOTES

This essay has been adapted from the entry "Hemingway, Ernest"
by Michael Reynolds that appears in the American National Biography,
10: 545-53, published by Oxford University Press 1999 American
Council of Learned Societies, use of portions of the text of the
entry by permission of the ACLS.
1. Gerald Murphy to Sara Murphy, 4-9 Sept. 1937, in Letters from
the Lost Generation, ed. Linda P. Miller (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1991), pp. 199-200.
2. Cdr. C. Alphonso Smith, USNR. "Battle of the Caribbean,"
United States Naval Institute Proceedings (Sept. 1954), 976-82.
3. Spruille Braden, Diplomats and Demagogues. (New Rochelle,
N.Y.: Arlington House, 1971), pp. 282-84.
4. National Archives and Records Administration (College Park,
Md.) Record Group 84, E-2359, Confidential Letter File, American
Embassy, Havana, 1942-43.
5. "The United States and Cuban-Spanish Relations," October
28, 1942, copy in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy
Library, Boston.
6. New York Times, Jan. 4, 1942, p. 1; New York Times Jan. 2, 1942, p.
11;New York Times, Feb. 1, 1942, p. 6.

A Brief Biography

49

7. "The Invaders," Newsweek (July 6, 1942), p. 304; Newsweek

(Aug. 17, 1942.), pp. 29-31.
8. New York Times, July 2, 1942, pp. 1, 8.
9. Newsweek (July 13, 1942), pp. 27-28. Leicester Hemingway's
feature stories proved more accurate than Ernest once thought.
10. Havana Post, Apr. 14, 1942.
11. National Archives and Records Administration (College Park,
Md.). Record Group-84: Foreign Service Posts, Havana Embassy
Confidential File 1 Comejen: a 942-43 Part 2: 711-815.6
12. National Archives and Record Administration (College Park,
Md.). Record Group 313 Records of Naval Operating Forces, Subset
Record Group 313.7 Records of Naval Sea Frontiers 1940-1950, War
Diary, Commander, Gulf Sea Frontier, May 1, 1942.
13. War Diary, May 18, 1942, Navy Operating Procedures update.
14. See New York Times, Jan. 4, 1942, p. 4; New York Times, Jan. 11,
1942, V, 7:1; New York Times, Jan. 25, 1942, p.2o; New York Times, Apr.
19, 1942, p. III, 7.
15. New York Times, June 28, 1942, p. 21.
16. New York Times, July 26, 1942, p. 22.
17. See Hemingway's Reading (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) item 1357, Felix Luckner, The Last Privateer, misidentified in Hemingway, Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's 1981).
18. Office of Naval Intelligence publications ONI 22O-M and ONI
22O-G. Hemingway's copy of ONI 22O-M is in the Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
19. Havana Post, May 2, 1942.
20. Hayne D. Boyden, letter to Ernest Hemingway, Nov. 2, 1942,
Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library. Since the Carlos
Baker biography, it has been commonly held that the Pilar patrols
began in June of 1942. Letters and documents at the Kennedy Library make it clear that the first armed cruise did not take place
until mid-November.
WORKS CITED

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and

Dispatches of Four Decades. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner's, 1967.

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Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway, Ernest. Dateline: TorontoThe Complete Toronto "Star"

Dispatches, 1920-1924. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner's,
1985.
Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
Hemingway Collection. Princeton University Library, Princeton,
N.J.
Hemingway Museum. Oak Park, III.
Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life without Consequences. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
Miller, Linda P. Letters from the Lost Generation. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway's First War: The Making of "A Farewell
to Arms." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
. Hemingway's Reading, 1910-1940: An Inventory. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981.
. Hemingway: The American Homecoming. Cambridge, U.K.:
Blackwell, 1992.
. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Blackwell, 1989.
. The Young Hemingway. New York: Blackwell, 1986.
Stephens, Robert O. Hemingway's Non-Fiction: The Public Voice.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.