Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway is known as an American author and journalist. He was born into the family of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall- Hemingway who was a musician. His mother and his father were well respected and well educated. The names of his siblings were Marceline, Sunny, and Ursula. Hemingway was the only son. Growing up, Hemingway was not a fan of his mother. In 1913 up until 1917, he went to Oak Park and River Forest High school. During his junior year Hemingway took a journalism class. Before taking the journalism class, Hemingway and his sister, Marceline, performed in the school orchestra because his mother stressed in him learning how to play the cello would be a great thing to obtain. While in high school Hemingway participated in several different sports such as boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. His strongest points in high school were in all his English classes.
Before turning nineteen, Hemingway had become an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in 1918. He wanted to serve in the marines or the army air service but he was not able to because he was nearsighted. This is why he ended up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Throughout his life he visited five battlefronts. Theses battlefronts were Italian-Austrian Front in 1918, Greece- Turkish war in 1922, Spanish Civil War in 1937 and 1938, The Second Sino-Japanese War in 1941 and Allied March through France in 1944. World War I shaped Hemingway in many ways, “They represent pivotal events in his development as a man and as an artist. Along with bullfighting, hunting, drinking and love, war is one of the enduring motifs of Hemingway's writing and his legendary life” (Hemingway at War).
On July 8, 1918, while handing out chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops, Hemingway was injured. Hemingway described that night as; “a round from a muzzle-loaded Austrian trench mortar (described as a five-gallon can filled with explosives and scrap metal) hit near him.” There was a flash, as a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself” (Hemingway at War). Ernest was recorded to have 227 shrapnel wounds in his leg where 10 were superficial. “His rapid rise to literary prominence rested in large part on his being a poster boy for the conflict's multitude of physically and emotionally scarred young men--those Gertrude Stein called "a lost generation" (Hemingway at War). Ernest Hemingway was able to write a Farewell to Arms because of the experience he had in the war. Lieutenant Frederic Henry would be his own semiautobiographical hero. Catherine Barkley played Lieutenant Frederic Henrys’ love in Farewell to Arms. Agnes von Kurowsky, known as Catherine Barkley, was the love affair that Hemingway had when he was recovering from his wounds. She was the Red Cross nurse who was seven years older than Hemingway. In January 1919, with his summer fling over, Hemingway went home to Oak Park, Illinois. In 1921, Ernest married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Their marriage lasted from 1921- 1927. Ernest married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927, which lasted till 1940. His marriage to Martha Gellhorn was from 1940-1945. He was with his wife Mary Welsh Hemingway from 1946 until his death in 1961. Ernest had three children: Jack, Patrick, and Gregory.
In the book Papa, Gregory tells us his experiences with his father. “The man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance, and although we always called him papa it was out of love, not fear” (Hemingway 3). He was a man that would brainstorm the sentence and imagine how it sounded in his mind before he wrote it down. “He always had the marvelous ear for words and he was certainly more experienced and wiser, but the old effortless