An icon of 20th Century literature, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois to Dr. Ed Hemingway and his wife Grace Hall. His mother wanted him to become interested in music, but Hemingway, like his father, was drawn to outdoor activities, including hunting and fishing. He attended Oak Park and River Forest High School, graduating in 1917. Rather than go to college, he became a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star for six months before trying to enlist in the Army when the United States entered World War I. Hemingway failed the medical exam because of his poor vision and joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps instead. On his first day at the Italian Front, Hemingway had to pick up mutilated body parts (mostly of women) that were scattered everywhere after an ammunition factory near Milan exploded. It was an experience that haunted him and which he wrote about in his short story A Natural History of the Dead.

Hemingway's experience as an ambulance driver was short-lived. On July 8, 1918 he was hit by an Austrian trench motor shell that drove fragments into his leg. Despite his injuries, he dragged an Italian soldier to safety, earning him the Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government. While recuperating, he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American girl serving as a nurse. Von Kurowsky eventually fell in love with an Italian officer, but the experience was the basis of Hemingway's later novel A Farewell to Arms.

Back from the war, Hemingway briefly moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada working for the Toronto Star, then returned to Illinois, where he married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. The Hemingways soon left the United States for Paris, where he covered the Greco-Turkish war for the newspaper. They would remain in Paris for two years, becoming part of the American expatriate community which included Gertrude Stein, later memorialized in Hemingway's A Movable Feast. It was in Paris that Hemingway's first book Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923.

After a short stay in the United States, he returned to Paris and wrote the semi-autobiographical The Sun Also Rises, his first full-length novel. Two years later, he divorced his wife to marry writer Pauline Pfeiffer and they moved to Key West, Florida in 1928, the same year that Hemingway's father committed suicide. The incident deeply troubled Hemingway and was later included in For Whom the Bell Tolls in a fictionalized form as the suicide of Robert Jordan's father.

While staying with Pauline's family in Piggott, Arkansas, Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms. The book was shopped around to the various studios by Hemingway's agent, Paul Reynolds, Sr. The book's sexual content worried both the studios and the censors. Paramount said "This is a magnificently written story and a great one, but it is not a story for a picture." The Motion Picture Producer's Association's Lamar Trotti wrote, "Much profanity - very much! Illicit love! Illegitimate birth! Desertion from the Army! Not very flattering picture of Italy in war days! A great book nevertheless." It was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who made an offer of $10,000, which Hemingway's agent thought was too low, angering Hemingway who wrote that Reynolds had "balled up play and film negociations [sic] completely. [...] I keep insisting I wanted and preferred cash from movies."

Reynolds' son, Paul, Jr., took over from his father and asked screenwriter Laurence Stallings to write an adaptation, which Hemingway agreed to and which later became a Broadway play. Stallings ended up getting an equal split of the theatrical and film sale rights, prompting Hemingway to angrily declare, "I'll be lucky to get $750 now, minus [Reynolds'] 10%." Two days after the play opened on Broadway, Paramount offered $80,000 for the film rights, of which Hemingway received $24,000. He wrote, "Don't let Reynolds tell you that I got two and a half times what the book would have brought for movies alone last fall a year ago...$80,000 was paid for the picture rights, which was negotiated by Stallings, Woods and their attorneys, but Reynolds, by his own accounting received $8,000, that is a third as much as I got for writing the book or Stallings for making the play, or Woods for producing it. He maneuvered it with the movie angle always in mind, so that he got the maximum possible commission, and I got a flop on Broadway that didn't even cover the advance."

The 1930s was spent writing novels in Key West and Havana, Cuba, trekking on safaris in Nairobi and Kenya, and reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Those experiences in 1937 and 1938 became the basis of For Whom the Bells Tolls. The book was published in October 1940 and was a best-seller. By 1943 it had sold over 750,000 copies in the United States. Two weeks after it was released, Paramount bought the film rights for $100,000 plus ten cents for every copy of the book sold, for up to an additional $500,000, the highest price paid to date. The film version was released in 1943, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

Howard Hawks, who directed the film adaptation of Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not once said, "I tried to get Ernest Hemingway to write for pictures as Bill Faulkner had done for me on several occasions, but Hemingway said that he was going to stick to the kind of writing that he knew best. Once, on a hunting trip, I told him that if he would give me the worst story that he had ever written, we would make a good movie out of it He asked me what I thought was his worst novel, and I said, To Have and Have Not , which I thought was a bunch of junk. He said that he had written it when he needed money, and that he didn't want me to make a movie out of it. But finally he gave in, and so Faulkner and Jules Furthman did the script." To Have and Have Not, which was released in 1944, was remade several times, most notably as The Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal, and the Audie Murphy film The Gun Runners (1958), directed by Don Siegel.

During World War II, Hemingway briefly served the Navy by patrolling the coast of Cuba and the U.S. for German submarines on his boat, Pilar. The FBI soon took over, and Hemingway went back to writing, acting as war correspondent for Collier's magazine. He witnessed the D-Day invasion from a landing craft while his third wife, writer Martha Gellhorn, scooped him by disguising herself as a nurse and getting onshore.

After the war, Hemingway continued to write while suffering from several illnesses and accidents. In 1952 he was involved in two airplane crashes, one of which nearly killed him and left him in constant pain for the rest of his life. The following year, 1953, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. Spencer Tracy starred in the 1958 film adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea produced by Warner Bros. It was the twelfth film based on Hemingway's work. It was also the only film that Hemingway was directly involved in, insisting that the producers be faithful to his work. He also demanded that the producers use real sharks and marlins, even trying to catch a live marlin for the film while on a fishing trip to Cuba and Peru with Leland Hayward. Despite that, Spencer Tracy battled rubber fish in a studio tank. In an interview with Time Magazine, Hemingway complained, "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. No picture with a f-ing rubber fish ever made a dime." Not surprising, Hemingway, who hated the film adaptations of his works, once said, "The best way for a writer to deal with Hollywood was to arrange a rendezvous with the movie men at the California State line. You throw your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell the way you came."

By the end of the 1950s, Hemingway's ill-health, heavy drinking, and mental illness had debilitated him. He underwent electroshock therapy in 1960, which his fourth wife Mary Welsh believed harmed, rather than helped him. Hemingway complained that the treatment was robbing him of his memory.

Hemingway had been haunted by thoughts of suicide throughout his life and the specter of his father's death had stayed with him. It is now believed that Hemingway's father suffered from haemochromatosis, the inability to metabolize iron which causes mental and physical deterioration. Ernest Hemingway was also diagnosed with this illness, which may have had some effect on his mental state. Several members of Hemingway's family have committed suicide: his sister Ursula, his brother Leicester and later his grand-daughter, actress Margaux Hemingway. After a previous attempt to take his own life a few months earlier, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Dunlavy Valentini, Patricia Understanding The Old Man and the Sea: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" Life Magazine July 26, 1943
Leff, Leonard J. Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture
Meyers, Jeffrey Hemingway: A Biography
Phillips, Gene D. Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema (Revised Edition)
Rama Rao, P.G. Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea