An E! True Hollywood Exclusive: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He first started writing in high school and in 1917 he took a job as a junior reporter writing for the Kansas City Star. As a junior reporter, he received training for newspaper writing which has been said to help form his writing style. He said about his training for newspaper writing: "in writing for a newspaper you told what happened and with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day." Hemingway’s style of writing can be described as simple or direct, but somehow without saying very much or used fancy words it communicates the story he is writing.

Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian Front during World War I. Supposedly he was the first American to be wounded during World War I when he was hurt by mortar fire. He and the nurse who took care of him when he was injured during the war fell in love, but she left him for an officer. This was his first serious relationship and probably influenced his writing of A Farewell to Arms, in which a soldier, injured in World War I, and the nurse who takes care of fall in love.

When the war was over, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson and moved to Paris for a honeymoon and also to work as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. In Paris, Hemingway met many other American expatriate writers, including Gertrude Stein, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound. Pound acted as somewhat of a mentor for Hemingway. It was in Paris and surrounded by these other American expatriate writers that he became associated with the “lost generation,” a term coined by Stein after she overheard a French mechanic call the generation of young people without automotive repair skills, “une génération perdue,” which refers to American writers who were disillusioned with their country.

After writing many stories about Europe, many of them related to things such as fishing or bullfighting or wars such as the Greco-Turkish War, he left in 1927 with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. This was in the wake ofgetting an injury in a Paris bathroom when he thought he was flushing the toilet but in reality caused a skylight to fall on his head, giving him a large scar. Rumors about how he might have gotten this scar in less mundane ways than how he actually did exemplify the mythos of Hemingway being a manly man, which was also fostered by his enjoyment of activities such as wartime reporting, big game hunting, and drinking hard liquor.

Hemingway married Mary Welsh, his third wife, in 1946. He had covered World War II and many of his friends were dying, including Fitzgerald and Stein, and he had many health problems, which caused him to be depressed. He didn’t write very much, and his last work, The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, was published in 1952. He committed suicide in 1961 in Idaho after returning to America after years of living abroad.