Ernest Hemingway Biography

Where Was Ernest Hemingway From?

Born in 1899 Oak Park Illinois, Ernest Hemingway cut his journalistic teeth writing for his high school newspaper, before landing a job at the Kansas City Star, where he once said that:

“On the Star, you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s World War I Injury

Serving as an ambulance driver in the First World War, Hemingway was injured by an exploding mortar shell—receiving some 237 bits of shrapnel, an aluminum kneecap and two Italian medals—later using his wartime experiences and close calls with death in several of his most acclaimed novels.

Moving to Paris after the war, Hemingway became a leading figure in what his friend and mentor Gertrude Stein famously called “The Lost Generation,” which was a group of Paris-based artists who seemed lost or misdirected during the early years after the war, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis and Pablo Picasso.

Books By Ernest Hemingway

During his Paris years, Hemingway frequented the famous running of the bulls in Pamplona Spain, which would lead to his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. Other acclaimed novels would follow, including A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, A Moveable Feast, For Whom the Bell Tolls and An Old Man and the Sea, the later earning him a long-denied Pulitzer Prize in literature.

Married four times in a life filled with adventure, hard-drinking and beautiful women, before his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes and numerous car crashes, as well as a gunshot wound while wrangling a shark off of Key West Florida.

After searching for U-boats in his beloved fishing boat, Pilar, he also served as a foreign correspondent during the Second World War, where he reported on several of the war’s most decisive turning point moments, including the D-Day landings at Normandy.

How Did Ernest Hemingway Die?

Battling deteriorating mental and physical health in his later years, Hemingway retired to Ketchum Idaho, where he committed suicide on July 2nd, 1961, ending the life of one of the most unique voices in modern literature.