The Life of Ernest Miller Hemingway

The Life of Ernest Miller Hemingway

There were several writers in the twentieth century, and among them was Ernest Miller Hemingway. Hemingway had a interesting, but strange life. By analyzing and exploring the literature and biographies of Ernest Hemingway, one will be able to understand the life of Ernest Hemingway and see the major contributions he had to literature.

He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway was born in the Hemingway family home, which was built by his grandfather Ernest Hall. He was the second child out of six, that were born to Clarence and Grace Hemingway. He had four sisters and one brother. He was named after his mother's father Ernest Hall and his great uncle Miller Hall. The area Ernest grew up in was a very conservative area of Illinois. It was the opposite of Chicago which was liberal. Hemingway was raised with values of strong religion, hard work, physical fitness and self determination. He was taught that if he went by these values in life, he would do good in whatever he did. When he was little, his father taught him to hunt and fish around the Lake Michigan area. Ernest's family had a summer house on a place called Walloon Lake in north Michigan, and the family would spent their summer there. When he was at the summerhouse, Hemingway would fish in the streams that ran into the lake, or take the little row boat on the lake to fish. He would also go squirrel hunting in the woods near the summer house. He liked to be by himself because he could think.

Nature is what inspired Ernest to create some of his greatest works. Even though Ernest liked nature, he often lived in major cities like Chicago, Toronto and Paris, but when he became successful he chose more isolated places to live like Key West, Cuba, or Ketchum, Idaho. Wherever he lived, he made sure he had access to hunting and fishing. When he wasn't hunting or fishing his mother taught him about music. His mother was a singer who once had thought about a professional career, but she chose to settle down with her husband instead. She occupied her time by giving voice and music lessons to local children. Sometimes she gave her own kids lessons. Hemingway never really liked music and he hated choir practices and cello lessons. Even though he didn't like music a lot, it helped him with his first wife, Hadley because she liked the piano.

Hemingway went to school in the Oak Park public school system. In high school he was okay at sports. He played football, swimming, water basketball and was the track team manager. He liked to also work on the high school newspaper called the Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles. He imitated the style of writer Ring Lardner who wrote with a sense of humor. Hemingway graduated high school in 1917 but instead of going to college like his parents wanted him to, he took a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. His uncle was responsible for him getting the job, because he knew the top editor. While Hemingway worked for the Kansas City Star he learned about how to write, and it showed in his later works of fiction. The newspaper advocated short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy. Hemingway later said: "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them" (Young 36).

The same time Ernest was graduating, World War I had started in Europe. Even though President Wilson tried to keep the US out of the war, they helped other countries in the fight against Germany and Austria. When Hemingway turned eighteen he tried to enlist in the army, but they turned him away because of poor vision. He had a bad eye like his mother. When he heard the Red Cross wanted volunteers for ambulance drivers he quickly signed up. The Red Cross accepted him so he left his job at the paper in 1918 and went to Europe in May. Hemingway first went to Paris when he got to Europe, then he went tp Milan. The day he arrived, a firearms factory exploded and he had to carry nasty bodies and body parts to a temporary morgue. Two days after that he was sent to an ambulance unit in a place called Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. A few weeks after arriving, he was hurt by pieces of a Austrian mortar shell that landed a few feet away from him. Hemingway was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers when this happened. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious, killed one soldier and blew the legs off another one.

After the explosion happened, historians aren't exactly sure what happened next because Ernest sometimes lied. In a letter to Hemingway's father another ambulance driver wrote that even though there was over 200 pieces of metal from the mortar shell in his legs he carried another injured soldier back to the first aid station. He also said that on the way Ernest was hit in the legs by bullets. In the hospital Ernest met one of his first loves. Her name was Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky and she was a twenty-six year old nurse who took care of Ernest while he was injured.

Ernest really liked Agnes since he first saw her and it seemed like she liked him too, but that's not what she said later in a letter to him. The letter said : " Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart."

Hemingway wanted to marry her, but she said because of the age difference she thought he wasn't mature enough. Plus she talked to other men. When Ernest left the hospital he wrote letters to her. Hemingeway was given the Italian Silver Medal for Valor. The words on the medal read:

"Gravely wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been evacuated" (Baker 54). Hemingway's wounding along the Piave River in Italy and his subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the relationship with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his great novel A Farewell To Arms.

When Hemingway went home from Italy in 1919 he thought that Oak Park wasn't as fun as it used to be and it was more boring now compared to being around the war. He was only nineteen years old, but the war had made him more mature. HIs parents didn't really like the fact that he had went over seas to the war, so living with them was hard on Ernest. After he came home his parents began to pressure him to find work or go back to college. He had received more than a thousand dollars from insurance for his war injuries, so because that was a lot of money back

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