A Short Biography of Author Ernest Hemingway

By Redd F. Griffin, Past chairman and a founding director of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park

Author Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in the village of Oak Park, Illinois, close to the prairies and woods west of Chicago. Both here and in Michigan, he would explore, camp, fish and hunt with his physician father, Dr. Clarence "Ed" Hemingway. In Chicago, he would attend concerts and operas and visit art museums with his mother, a musician and painter. Both parents and their nearby families fostered the Victorian priorities of the time: religion, family, work and discipline. They followed the Victorians' elaborate, sentimental style in living and writing. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, Ernest reported and wrote articles, poems and stories for the school's publications largely based on his direct experiences.

The year Ernest graduated he began reporting for the Kansas City Star. Here he learned to get to the heart of a story with direct, simple sentences. After entering World War I the following year, he was wounded near the Italian/Austrian front. Hospitalized, he fell in love with his nurse, who later called off their relationship. These dramatic personal events against the backdrop of a brutal war became the basis of Hemingway's first widely successful novel, A Farewell to Arms, published in the following decade.

In Europe in the 1920's, Ernest learned from avant-garde writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound their literary spareness and compression. Hemingway used these methods in short stories and novels that captured the attention of both critics and the public.

After growing success with his ground-breaking style, Hemingway wrote out of his own direct experience about bullfighting, big game hunting and deep-sea fishing on three continents. In the 1930's, he turned to writing for causes, including democracy as he knew it in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In each conflict he sought support for the side he favored. But he insisted on impartially telling "how it was" in both wars, which he knew firsthand from being there.

In the years following World War II, many critics said Hemingway's best writing was past. But he surprised them all by publishing the novella, The Old Man and the Sea, about a poor Cuban fisherman's struggle to land a great fish. This work led to his Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for his "powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration."

Hemingway's years following these awards saw few works as successful as his novella or earlier writing. The effects of Ernest's lifelong depressions, illnesses and accidents were catching up with him. It was especially devastating now that he could no longer write as he once did. In July, 1961, he ended his life in Ketchum, Idaho. But as he had hoped, his writing lives on. His works continue to sell very well, translated in an amazing variety of languages around the world.