Tanvir's Blog

Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize winning 20th century American novelist and notable journalist.

Profile

Name: Ernest Hemingway
Birth Name: Ernest Miller Hemingway
AKA: Ernest M. Hemingway
Nickname: Papa, Ernestoic, Tatie, Tiny, Ernie, Hem, Wemedge, Hemmy
Date of Birth: July 21, 1899
Place of Birth: Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois
Zodiac Sign: Cancer
Death: July 2, 1961
Place of Death: Ketchum, Idaho
Cause of Death: Suicide by gunshot
Place of Burial: Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho.
Height: 6 ft
Father: Clarence Hemingway (1871-1928)
Mother: Grace Hall Hemingway (1872-1951)
Siblings: 5
- Sister: Marcelline Hemingway (1898-1963)
- Sister: Ursula Hemingway (1902-1966)
- Sister: Carol Hemingway (1911-2002)
- Sister: Madelaine Hemingway (1904-1995)
- Brother: Leicester Hemingway (1915-1982)
Spouse: 4; Offspring: 3
- Wife 1: Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1891-1979), married 1921, divorced 1927
- Son: John Hadley Nicanor "Jack" Hemingway (1923-2000)
- Wife 2: Pauline Marie Pfeiffer (1895-1951), married 1927, divorced 1940
- Son: Patrick Hemingway (b. 1928)
- Son: Gregory Hancock Hemingway (1931 –2001)
- Wife 3: Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), married 1940, divorced 1945
- Wife 4: Mary Welsh (1908-1986) married 1946, till his death
Education: Oak Park and River Forest High School
Known for: his body of works reflecting his experiences with war, death, and particularly his dissatisfaction with the modern culture
Criticised for: being sexist and homophobic
Influences: Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Cézanne, Anton Chekhov, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gertrude Stein
Influenced: Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Charles Bukowski, John Updike

Quotes

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Major Themes

Love
War
Wilderness
Loss

Major Works

Novels/Novella

The Torrents of Spring (1925)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not(1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Garden of Eden (1986)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Short Story Collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1932)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Essential Hemingway (1947)
The Hemingway Reader (1953)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)

Did you know?

In 1953 Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his novel The Old Man and the Sea in 1954.
The Old Man and the Sea was made into a film in 1958.
He was married four times, and dedicated a book for each wife at the time of marriage.
Hemingway served in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army.
Hemingway was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery for his exemplary service in the Italian Army.
Within a year of his service as an ambulance driver, Hemingway was severely wounded and this event provided him the materials for his prominent work A farewell to Arms.
Hemingway used to drink in Paris with the Irish novelist James Joyce.
Grace Hemingway had a strong obsession for a pair of twin girls, so she used to dress young Hemingway and his older sister in matching pink dresses and called him Ernestine.
His father was a country physician and his mother was a religiously puritanical woman.
Hemingway was the second of six children to his parents.
Hemingway was born into the hands of his physician father.
Hemingway’s father increased his interest in history and literature as well as hunting and fishing.
Hemingway’s mother used to abuse his father.
In 1923 Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems.
In 1928 Clarence Hemingway committed suicide by using his father's Civil War pistol.
After his father’s suicide Hemingway began to have premonitions that he would end his life by his own hand.
In July 2, 1961 Hemingway committed suicide with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho out of depression, alcoholism, and numerous physical ailments.
His son, Gregory Hemingway underwent sex reassignment surgery in the mid 1990s and from then on he was known as Gloria Hemingway.
Many of his works were published posthumously such as, Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), True at First Light (1999).
His posthumous publications were edited by his fourth wife, Mary Welsh and by his son Patrick Hemingway.