Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Cicero, Illinois and was raised in this Chicago suburb his whole life. His family also had a cabin in Northern Michigan where he learned to hunt, fish, and appreciate the outdoors, which later became the topic of many of his stories. Hemingway started his writing career by writing for his high school newspaper. Immediately after graduation, he went to continue his journalism career by working for the Kansas City Star. In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his service, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained multiple injuries and had to be put in a hospital in Milan. There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left him for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided ideas for several of his stories. It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign writer for the Star. Hemingway and Hadley divorced because of his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley was finalized. Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida. As you could probably guess, the couple divorced. He met Martha Gellhorn while reporting the Spanish civil war and they got married soon after and purchased a farm in Cuba, which would serve as their winter residence. Toward the end of World War 2, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would later marry after divorcing Martha Gellhorn. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, Hemingway's body and mind were becoming old and unreliable. Recovering from various old injuries in Cuba, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease. He then moved to Idaho and eventually ended up committing suicide on July 2, 1961 in his home.