Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in a small community of Oak Park, Illinois. He was the second child out of six, with four sisters and one brother. The area Ernest grew up in was a very conservative area of Illinois and was raised with values of strong religion, hard work, physical fitness and self-determination. His household was a very strict one that didn’t allow any enjoyment on Sundays and disobedience was strictly punished. Ernest’s father taught him good morals and values that he if he followed that he would be good in life.
His father also taught him to hunt and fish around the Lake Michigan area and to love nature. The family would spend their summers in the wilderness and their winters back near Chicago. For the rest of his life Hemingway remained an avid fisherman and never lived far form a fishing hole. The outdoors is where he created a lot of his work, and a place where he got a lot of his inspiration from. Hemingway went to school in the Oak Park public school system where he wrote for the High School paper. Hemingway graduated high school in 1917 and then he took a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
This was against his parent’s wishes of him going to college to become a professional. While Hemingway worked for the Star, he learned to elaborate more and polished his writing ability positively. He found out after awhile that writing for the newspaper wasn’t for him. He had tried to join the military after he had graduated from high school but they did not accept him in because of a vision problem. Hemingway was anxious to be a part of the military because the United States was involved in World War I.
Hemingway heard about the Red Cross’s mission to find ambulance drivers for the war. The Red Cross accepted Hemingway in and he was first shipped to Italy. Ernest was very proud because he knew that ambulance drivers were important personnel and played a very important part in the war. They had to risk their own lives and go into battlefields and pick up the wounded or dead. His initiation in the ambulance corps was a remarkable first day because a munitions depot exploded. He found himself on his first day picking up body parts and wounded people.
Two days after that he was sent to an ambulance unit in a place called Schio which he found very boring and demanded a different assignment. He signed up for a canteen duty that mounted canteens that fed and provided for the troops who were on the ‘battlefield’. A little later he was hit by Austrian artillery and shrapnel was stuck in his leg. It took him several months to walk again fully, but this longed stay at the hospital had some positive to it too. He formed a romance with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, which he considered as one of his first loves.
Hemingway’s wounding by artillery his recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the relationship with this nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his great novel A Farewell To Arms. When Hemingway returned home from Italy, he found his hometown dull from the war and romance of Agnes that he had just left. His parents began to pressure him to find work or to further his education, but Hemingway couldn’t seem to muster interest in anything. He had received some $1,000 dollars in insurance payments for his war wounds, which allowed him to avoid work for nearly a year.
During this time he spent his time at the library or at home reading. He spoke to small civic organizations about his war exploits also. In this experience in his life he writes a story of what he encountered. “Soldier’s Home” conveys his feelings of frustration and shame upon returning home to a town and to parents who still had a romantic notion of war and who didn’t understand the psychological impact the war had on him. Hemingway later took another writing job at The Toronto Star and fell in love again.
He married Hadley Richardson and moved there after to France as a European correspondent for the Star. He began meeting very important writers in his stay in Paris and moved back to North America to give birth to their new child. Hemingway and Hadley separated when he had an affair with another woman Vogue Editor from Arkansas called Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley had insisted that in order for Hemingway to gain a divorce from her, that Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer were to live apart for six months and if, after that time, they were still in love, she would give him a divorce.
Hemingway succeeded with this ultimatum and married Pauline after his divorce went through. Pauline’s and Hemingway’s three week honeymoon was spent at a small fishing port in France. Sea, sun, fishing, swimming and writing occupied his time but he cut his foot badly which became infected with anthrax. He got severely sick,depressed, and couldn’t even write. He wrote another work The Mount Of Kiliminjaro on this experience.
Again his romantic escapades take another turn as he divorces Pauline and marries Martha Gellhorn that didn’t even last two years before he fell in love with another woman, Mary Welsh. He found the rest of his days in depression of the failed marriage of Martha. Ernest Hemingway forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century and created a mythological hero in himself that captivated (and at times confounded) not only serious literary critics but the average man as well. He also had established himself as an avid outdoorsman, and being a lady’s man, which some say got the best of him.