Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born into a well-educated, creative family in Oak Park, a conservative suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor with a passion for the outdoors, and his mother was an amateur musician who encouraged her son to learn to play the cello. Hemingway’s passion for literature was already evident in high school, where he loved English and wrote for the school newspaper. After graduating from high school, Hemingway spent six months working as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before signing up to be a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy in 1918. While in Europe, Hemingway witnessed a munitions factory explosion and was himself badly wounded by shrapnel, experiences that traumatized the 18-year-old. While in the hospital, he met “Chink” Dorman-Smith, whom he describes in A Moveable Feast as his best friend. After the end of the First World War, Hemingway took a job as a reporter for the Toronto Star Weekly. He moved to Chicago, where he met Hadley Richardson, who became his first wife. Hemingway was given an appointment as a foreign correspondent for The Toronto Star and the young couple moved to Paris, where most of A Moveable Feast takes place. In Paris, Hemingway found himself at the center of a hotbed of artistic activity. He developed friendships with many of the most important writers of the early 20th century, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. In 1926, Hemingway began having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer (loosely sketched in A Moveable Feast); he married Pauline the following year after divorcing Hadley. Hemingway left Paris in 1928, moving to Key West, Florida. He continued to travel the world, visiting the Caribbean and East Africa, and in 1937 he went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. He later divorced Pauline to marry Martha Gelhorn, a war correspondent he met in Spain, although in 1945 he left her for another journalist, Mary Welsh. Hemingway was in Europe for much of the Second World War and he witnessed the liberation of Paris, during which time he saw many of his old friends. Following the war, Hemingway survived two plane crashes and, in 1954, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1957 he discovered a trunk of old notebooks from his time in Paris, and he began revising this material to become A Moveable Feast. By this time, Hemingway’s mental health had deteriorated as a result of lifelong alcoholism and a possible genetic disease. He was intensely paranoid and in poor physical condition. He shot himself in 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.