Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago that was also home to the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His father, Clarence E. Hemingway, was a doctor; his mother, who was very religious, had given up a promising career as a singer in order to rear six children, of whom Ernest was the third and the oldest boy.
Hemingway attended public school in Oak Park, and the family vacationed in the north woods of Michigan, where Clarence taught Ernest hunting and fishing and a general love of the outdoor life. Later, Hemingway would portray Oak Park’s bourgeois values in an unflattering light in stories like “Soldier’s Home”; his parents’ marriage was the subject of the bitterly resentful tale “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” among others. On the other hand, Hemingway wrote with nothing less than adoration about life “Up in Michigan,” in the story of that name and many others featuring his fictional alter ego Nick Adams. Clarence Hemingway committed suicide in 1928.
Upon graduation from high school at the age of 17, Hemingway left Oak Park for a stint as a reporter at the highly respected daily newspaper The Kansas City Star. Shortly afterward, he enlisted in a Red Cross ambulance corps stationed on the Austrian front in Italy during the last year of World War I. Hemingway was wounded almost immediately (he was delivering cigarettes and chocolate to Italian soldiers beyond the front lines) and sent to an American hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky; these events inspired the Hemingway novel A Farewell to Arms (published 1929). After the war, Hemingway returned to the States in the hopes of beginning a career of one kind or another that would support him and Agnes, whom he planned to marry. That plan was shattered when she wrote from Europe to say that she’d fallen in love with another man.
Instead, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in 1921; shortly thereafter, the couple moved to Paris, where the first of the writer’s three sons was born. All the while, Hemingway was reading as much as he could, writing stories and poems, and trying to find his voice as a writer—a process that suffered a devastating setback when a suitcase containing all the copies of all the stories he had written to date (four years’ work) was stolen from Hadley on a train to Switzerland.
