Ernest Hemingway’s colorful life as a war correspondent, big game hunter, angler, writer, and world celebrity, as well as winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, began in quiet Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. When Ernest, the first son and second child born to Dr. Ed and Grace Hemingway, was only seven weeks old, his general practitioner father took the family for a quick weekend trip to the Michigan north woods, where Dr. Hemingway was having land cleared by several Ottawa Indians for Windemere, a summer cabin that he built on Walloon Lake. Ernest would return to this area year after year, as a child and later as an adolescent—hunting, fishing, camping, vegetable gardening, adventuring, and making plans for each new, successive summer.
Ernest’s mother, a devout, religious woman with considerable musical talent, hoped that her son would develop an interest in music; she herself had once hoped for an operatic career, but during her first recital at Carnegie Hall, the lights were so intense for her defective eyes that she gave up performing. Ernest attempted playing the cello in high school, but from the beginning, it was clear that he was no musician. Instead, he deeply shared his father’s fierce enthusiasm for the outdoors.
Ernest began fishing when he was three years old, and his fourth birthday present was an all-day fishing trip with his father. For his twelfth birthday, his grandfather gave him a single-barrel 20-gauge shotgun. His deep love of hunting and fishing in the north Michigan woods during his childhood and adolescence formed lasting impressions that would be ingredients for his short stories centering around Nick Adams, Hemingway’s young fictional persona.
In high school, Hemingway played football, mostly lightweight football, because he was small and thin. Hoping for more success in another sport, Hemingway took up boxing. Years later, he would often write, using boxing metaphors; he would also tell people that it was a boxing accident that was responsible for his defective eyesight. Hemingway was always self-conscious about seeming less than the best at whatever he chose to do. For example, he had a lifelong difficulty pronouncing his l’s; his sounded like w’s. His perfectionist father always stressed that whatever Ernest did, he must “do it right.” The stigma of having a slight speech defect and genetically flawed eyesight continually rankled Hemingway.
Hemingway’s writing career began early. He was a reporter for The Trapeze, his high-school newspaper, and he published a couple of stories in the Tabula, the school’s literary magazine. Ironically, he remained an atrocious speller throughout his life. Whenever editors would complain about his bad spelling, he’d retort, “Well, that’s what you’re hired to correct!”
After Ernest’s high-school graduation, Dr. Hemingway realized that his son had no passion for further education, so he didn’t encourage him to enroll in college. Neither did he encourage him to join the boys his age who were volunteering for the army and sailing to Europe to fight in World War I. Instead, Dr. Hemingway took another approach: He called the Kansas City Star to find out if his son could sign on as a cub reporter. He learned that an opening wouldn’t be available until September, news that delighted Ernest because it meant that he could spend another summer in the north Michigan woods hunting and fishing before he began working in the adult world.
Arriving in Kansas City to work for the Star, young Hemingway began earning fifteen dollars a week. He was taught to write short sentences, avoid clichés, unnecessary adjectives, and construct good stories. He soon realized that a large part of Kansas City life was filled with crime and impulsive violence. It was an exciting time for the naive, eager, red-cheeked young man from the north woods who was determined to learn how to write well.
A few months passed, and despite the satisfying pace of his life and the thrill of seeing his work in print, Hemingway realized that most of the young men he knew were leaving to take part in the war in Europe. Hemingway’s father was still opposed to his son’s joining the army, and Hemingway himself knew that his defective eyesight would probably keep him from being accepted. However, Hemingway met Theodore Brumback, a fellow reporter with vision in only one eye at the Star, who suggested that Hemingway volunteer for the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. Hemingway’s yearning to join the war effort was rekindled, and six months after he began his career as a newspaper reporter, he and Brumback resigned from the Star, said goodbye to their families, and headed to New York for their physicals. Hemingway received a B rating and was advised to get some glasses.
The letters that Hemingway wrote home to his parents while he was waiting to sail overseas were jubilant. The voyage from New York to France aboard the Chicago, however, was less exultant. Hemingway’s second typhoid shot had left him nauseated and aching, and rough seas sent him retching to the rails several times.
At Bordeaux, France, Hemingway and Brumback boarded a train headed to Milan, Italy. Shortly after they settled in, a munitions factory exploded, and Hemingway was stunned to discover that “the dead are more women than men.” After a few weeks of making routine ambulance runs and transporting dying and wounded men to hospitals, Hemingway grew impatient. Wanting to see more action, he traveled to the Austro-Italian border, where he finally had a sense of being at the wartime front.
During this time near the Austro-Italian border, Hemingway was severely wounded. An Austrian projectile exploded in the trenches and sent shrapnel ripping into his legs. Trying to carry an Italian soldier to safety, Hemingway caught a machine-gun bullet behind his kneecap and one in his foot. A few days later, he found himself on a train, returning to Milan. Later, writing about being wounded, he recalled that he felt life slipping from him. Some literary critics believe that it was this near death experience that obsessed Hemingway with a continual fear of death and a need to test his courage that lasted the rest of his life.
A few months later, the war was over and Hemingway returned to the States with a limp and a fleeting moment of celebrity. At home in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway immediately felt homesick for Italy. All of his friends were gone, and he received a letter from a nurse with whom he’d fallen in love while he was hospitalized. The news was not good: She had fallen in love with an Italian lieutenant. Ten years later, this nurse would become the model for the valiant Catherine Barkeley in A Farewell to Arms.
Returning to the north woods to find his emotional moorings, Hemingway fished, wrote some short-story sketches, and enjoyed a brief romance that would figure in “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow.” He also spoke to women’s clubs about his wartime adventures, and one of the women in the audience, a monied Toronto matron, was so impressed with Hemingway that she hired him as a companion for her lame son.
Tutoring the boy and filling a scrapbook with writings in Canada, Hemingway then headed back to the Midwest, where he met Hadley Richardson, seven years older than he and an heiress to a small trust fund.
Hadley fell in love with Hemingway. Hemingway’s ever-fretting, over-protective mother thought that Hadley was exactly what her rootless son needed; she prodded Hemingway to settle down and give up his gypsy travels and short-term, part-time jobs.
