Ernest Hemingway was born in
Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899.
He later portrayed his middle-class parents rather harshly, condemning
them for their conventional morality and values. As a young man,
he left home to become a newspaper writer in Kansas City. Early
in 1918, he joined the Italian Red Cross
and served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, in
which the Italians allied with the British, French, and Americans
against Germany and Austria-Hungary. During his time abroad, Hemingway
had two experiences that affected him profoundly and that would
later inspire one of his most celebrated novels, A Farewell
to Arms. The first occurred on July 8, 1918, when
a trench mortar shell struck him while he crouched beyond the front
lines with three Italian soldiers. Though Hemingway embellished
the story over the years, it is certain that he was transferred
to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse
named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are divided over Agnes’s role
in Hemingway’s life and writing, but there is little doubt that
his relationship with her informed the relationship between Lieutenant
Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
After his recovery, Hemingway spent several years as a
reporter, during which time he honed the clear, concise, and emotionally evocative
writing style that generations of authors after him would imitate.
In September 1921, he married his first of
four wives and settled in Paris, where he made valuable connections
with American expatriate writers including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
Hemingway’s landmark collection of stories, In
Our Time, introduced Nick Adams, one of the author’s favorite
protagonists, whose difficult road from youth into maturity he chronicled.
Hemingway’s reputation as a writer, however, was most firmly established
by the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and A
Farewell to Arms in 1929.
Critics generally agree that A Farewell to Arms is
Hemingway’s most accomplished novel. It offers powerful descriptions
of life during and immediately following World War I and brilliantly
maps the psychological complexities of its characters using a revolutionary, pared-down
prose style. Furthermore, the novel, like much of Hemingway’s writing
during what were to be his golden years, helped to establish the
author’s myth of himself as a master of many trades: writing, soldiering,
boxing, bullfighting, big-game hunting.
Hemingway was skilled, to a greater or lesser extent,
in each of these arts, but most critics maintain that his writing
fizzled after World War II, when his physical and mental health
declined. Despite fantastic bouts of depression, Hemingway did muster
enough energy to write The Old Man and the Sea, one
of his most beloved stories, in 1952. This
novella earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and three years later Hemingway
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Still, not even these
accolades could soothe the devastating effects of a lifetime of
debilitating depression. On July 2, 1961,
Hemingway killed himself in his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
