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| Birth Name(s) : Ernest Hemingway |
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Full Ernest Hemingway Biography
Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, J. D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Colm Tóibín
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the third son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds "Doctor Ed" Hemingway, a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror. One of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, entertained Hemingway with a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." (Hemingway, for his part, would quote this line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his famous short stories set in Africa.) To another soldier, Hemingway once said, "You are troppo vecchio for this war, pop." The 50-year old soldier replied, "I can die as well as any man."
After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United States in part due to prohibition, in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as the Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario. During his stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris.
Some sources have speculated that Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on openly gay individuals, such as Jean Cocteau, was overcompensation for latent homosexuality. In one such instance, an anecdote told by Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." ). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil", a salacious, phallic allusion. The proposed argument is that the rage against Cocteau and Radiguet (whose relationship has been heavily contested in other sources) shows an inherent hostility against homosexuals which also becomes a central theme of much of his short fiction, including "The Sea Change".La Closerie des Lilas restaurant (seen here in 1909), where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises.
Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become an aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain, he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he).
Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four contentious years, Hemingway married war correspondent Mary Welsh Hemingway, whom he had met overseas in 1944. He returned to Cuba, and in 1945 at the Soviet Embassy became public witness to the Rolando Masferrer schism within the Cuban communist party (García Montes, and Alonso Ávila, 1970 p. 362).
Hemingway is believed to have purchased the weapon he used to commit suicide at Sun Valley, Idaho, which was then a firearm supplier. In a particularly gruesome suicide, he rested the gun butt of the double-barreled shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over it to put the twin muzzles to his forehead just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers. Despite the circumstances, the coroner, at request of the family, did not do an autopsy.
Nonfiction
- (1932) Death in the Afternoon
- (1935) Green Hills of Africa
- (1962) Hemingway, The Wild Years
- (1964) A Moveable Feast
- (1967) By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
- (1970) Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter
- (1981) Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters
- (1985) The Dangerous Summer
- (1985) Dateline: Toronto |
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