Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was an Illinois doctor's son who became a journalist , author, and war correspondent.

He was named after his grandfather Ernest Hall (1840-1905), an English-born immigrant who had fought for the North in the American Civil War and who lived with the family when Ernest was a child.

Ernest Hemingway went to Oak Park and River Forest High School, but he did not go on to college, preferring to take a job as a cub reporter. After a few months, wanting to get out to the first world war then raging in Europe, he joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps, which took him to Paris and then Italy. He was wounded by Austrian mortar fire in July, 1918, and received the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valour. His wartime experiences were later turned into his early novel, A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway wrote for newspapers, as well as short stories and novels, and he came to be seen as an important literary voice, generally extolling the virtues of patience, stoicism and determination. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize for Literature the next year. Just seven years later, at the age of sixty-one, Hemingway committed suicide, by a gun-shot to the head - just as his father had killed himself. That seems ironic, as his heroes were tough guys - men who can take the heat. However, suicide is common in the Hemingway family: Apart from Ernest himself and his father, his brother Leicester, his sister Ursula, and his grand-daughter Margaux all killed themselves.

Hemingway was married four times, to Elizabeth Richardson in 1921, Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927, Martha Gellhorn in 1940, and lastly Mary Welsh in 1946. He lived much of his life outside the U.S., including several years in Paris and much of a twenty year period in Cuba, where he bought an estate near Havana.

He had three sons from his first two marriages, John, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway, and later three grand-daughters, Joan Hemingway, Margaux Hemingway, and Mariel Hemingway.