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Birth and Family
Ernest Miller Hemingway is born in what would become Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. He is the second of six children of Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician and outdoorsman, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a talented singer and music teacher. -
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Highschool
From 1913 until 1917, Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School. He participated in many sports: boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. During his junior year, he had a journalism class, structured "as though the classroom were a newspaper office", with better writers submitting pieces to the school newspaper, The Trapeze. -
World War I
in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment in Kansas City and became an ambulance driver in Italy. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, despite his wounds, Hemingway guided Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery. While recovering from his injuries he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse. At the end of the war, he returned to Illinois a changed man. -
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Post WWI in Chicago
Once Hemingway returned to Illinois he began as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. He returned to Michigan the following June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star. In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth. While there he met a journalist Sherwood Anderson, which he would marry her September 3, 1921. -
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Life in Paris and Other Travels
Soon after being married they moved to Paris. He takes a job sending stories from Europe to The Toronto Star. He met the poet Ezra Pound in Paris, and authors Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. In 1923 he went to Pamplona, Spain, and sees his first bullfight which was the inspiration for his greatest work, The Sun Also Rises. A year later his first son Jack was born. Hadley became aware of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced, he married Pauline and moved to Key West -
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Key West and Trip and Trip to Africa
Later that year his son Patrick is born. His father kills himself with a .32 revolver. That next year he publishes A Farewell to Arms. After a hunting trip with Dos Passos, he breaks his arm in an auto accident. This is only in a series of many injuries to his arms, legs, and head.In 1931 he had his third son Gregory. In 1933, He and his wife went on safari to East Africa, and writes, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" -
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Spanish Civil War and Cuba
He serves as a war correspondent during the Spanish civil war. He contributes funds to the Loyalist cause and publishes "To Have and Have Not", his most overtly political novel. In early 1939, Hemingway went to Cuba to live in Havana. While there he split up with Pauline. He then marries writer Martha Gellhorn and publishes "For Whom the Bell Tolls", his best-selling novel about a band of guerrillas fighting on the Loyalist side in the Spanish civil war. -
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WWII and Post WWII
As a war correspondent, he observes D-day and attaches himself to the 22nd Regiment, 4th Infantry Division for operations leading to the liberation of Paris and the battle of Hurtgenwald. He begins a relationship with newswoman Mary Welsh. Martha Gellhorn divorces him in December. He marries Mary in March. They live in his Finca Vigia in Cuba and later in Ketchum, Idaho. He Publishes "Across the River and into the Trees", a novel about a December-May romance set in post World War II Europe. -
Trip to Africa and Nobel Prize
In 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two plane crashes. He chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary. The next day, attempting to reach medical care in Entebbe, they boarded a second plane that exploded at take-off. He is reported dead in some accounts, but soon afterward he meets the press, telling them, "My luck she is still good." He is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. -
Death
In declining health, he follows the Antonio Ordez and Luis Miguel Dominguin bullfights and observes his sixtieth birthday in Spain. Based on these experiences he writes a nonfiction work, "The Dangerous Summer," for an issue of Life magazine. It is his last work published during his lifetime. During his final years, Hemingway had been diagnosed with the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. -
Death Cont.
Added to Hemingway's physical ailments was that he had been a heavy drinker for most of his life. in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway "deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun.
