Shrapnel at eighteen forged Hemingway’s spare prose myth
Before the Nobel and the fishing legends, Ernest Hemingway was an underage Red Cross ambulance driver shredded by mortar fire on the Italian front. The wound, a nurse’s rejection, and Paris’s Lost Generation shaped an understated style that remade twentieth-century fiction.
Born 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, to physician Clarence and musician Grace Hemingway, he edited high-school papers under a Ring Lardner Jr. pen name. Poor eyesight blocked Army enlistment; in 1918 he sailed for Italy with the Red Cross. On 8 July, after carrying canteen goods to the line, mortar fire wounded him badly; he still helped Italian soldiers and received valor medals. He was the second of six children, raised in a seven-bedroom house with a music studio and a medical office. His mother made him learn the cello, which he later credited for the contrapuntal shape of For Whom the Bell Tolls, while summers at Windemere on Walloon Lake in Michigan taught him hunting, fishing and camping. Before the war he spent six months reporting for The Kansas City Star.
Hospital recovery brought love for nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who later left him for an Italian officer—a pattern biographers say scarred later relationships. In 1921 he moved to Paris for the Toronto Star, joining modernist expatriates. The Sun Also Rises announced the voice in 1926; after settling in Key West in 1928 he drew on the war for A Farewell to Arms in 1929; Spain’s civil war fed For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won a Pulitzer before the 1954 Nobel Prize.
He covered Normandy and the liberation of Paris as a journalist. Two 1954 African plane crashes left him in pain for years. Seven novels, six story collections, and two nonfiction books include several American classics. He died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on 2 July 1961.
Source: Ernest Hemingway
