Ernest Hemingway

NAME Ernest Miller Hemingway

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, renowned for his spare, muscular prose style and adventurous life. His novels, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, helped redefine modern fiction. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and became as famous for his larger-than-life persona as for his literary achievements.

BIRTH Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois (then called Cicero), an affluent suburb just west of Chicago. He weighed nine and a half pounds and measured twenty-three inches tall. He was born into the hands of his physician father. His hair was initially black and thick though it would later turn yellow.​

Ernest Hemingway as a baby

FAMILY BACKGROUND Hemingway was the second of six children born to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician and opera singer. His father, whom patients called "Doc Ed," was interested in history, literature, and outdoor activities like fishing and hunting. His mother was a well-known musician in Oak Park who had once been an aspiring opera singer and taught music and voice lessons. Grace Hall was a strictly religious woman with a melodramatic and mercurial temperament. 

Hemingway was named after his maternal grandfather, Ernest Miller Hall, with whom the family lived after his parents married in 1896.​

His siblings included his older sister Marcelline (born 1898), followed by Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904), Carol (1911), and his younger brother Leicester (1915). The Hemingway family shared a tragic tendency toward depression and suicide—Ernest's father, brother, sister, and granddaughter all took their own lives.​

CHILDHOOD Hemingway's childhood was spent in the conservative suburb of Oak Park, which he would later describe as a place of "wide lawns and narrow minds". His father taught him to love nature and the outdoors, often taking him on fishing and hunting trips to the family cabin at Walloon Lake in northern Michigan starting when he was four or five years old. (1)

His mother nurtured his artistic side, teaching him to play the cello (despite his refusal to learn) and taking him to opera houses and museums in Chicago. Though he later admitted the music lessons contributed to his writing style, evidenced in the "contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls, as an adult Hemingway professed to hate his mother.​ (1)

Grace had eccentric tendencies. She had an odd fondness for dressing young Ernest and his older sister Marcelline as "twins"—sometimes as boys with short hair and overalls, and sometimes as girls with flowery dresses and long hair. This occurred frequently enough that three-year-old Ernest worried at Christmas that Santa Claus wouldn't know he was a boy. Ernest was six when Grace finally allowed him to cut off his long locks for good.​

The family also spent significant time at their cabin by Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, where Hemingway developed a deep love of the outdoors. 

EDUCATION Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School between 1913 and 1917. He excelled in English classes and was active in several sports, including boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline, receiving good grades in English. During his last two years at high school, he edited the school's newspaper and yearbook (the Trapeze and Tabula), writing primarily about sports and imitating the language of popular sportswriters. He contributed under the pen name Ring Lardner Jr.—a nod to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune. Inspired by teachers like Margaret Dixon and especially Fannie Biggs, Hemingway regularly contributed to the school's publications.​

After graduating high school in 1917, Hemingway did not pursue college as his parents wished. Instead, he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter, gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down writing style. Although he stayed there only for six months, the Star's style guide, which stated "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative," became a foundation for his prose.​ (2)

CAREER RECORD 1917 Started work as a provincial Kansas City reporter aged 18. A journalist during World War 1.

1918 An ambulance driver with the American Red Cross Motor Corps on the Italian front.

Hemingway in American Red Cross uniform, 1918.

1919 After returning from World War I service, Hemingway joined the Toronto Star and the Cooperative Commonwealth in Chicago

1921 Hemingway was chosen as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and moved to Paris.

1923 His first collection, Three Stories and 10 Poems, was published in Paris.

1926 His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published.

1937 Sent to Spain as a war correspondent for the American Newspaper Alliance during the Spanish Civil War.

1944-45 During World War II, Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.​

APPEARANCE Hemingway stood six feet tall (1.83 m), barrel-chested with broad shoulders, piercing brown eyes, and what one admirer called “Hollywood white teeth.” In his later years, he grew a thick grey beard and favored heavy spectacles, giving him a rugged, sea-worn look.(3)

Hemingway weighed approximately 200 pounds, with most of his weight concentrated above his waist. He had square heavy shoulders, long hugely muscled arms (the left one jaggedly scarred and a bit misshapen at the elbow from war wounds), a deep chest, and a belly-rise but no hips or thighs. 

Hemingway in 1948

FASHION Hemingway's personal style was carefully curated to build his public mythology as a rugged adventurer. His wardrobe included safari jackets, viyella shirts, high boots, thick wool sweaters, and sheepskin vests in regular rotation. The safari jacket became particularly associated with his image—four-pocketed, incredibly functional, great looking, and hard-wearing.​

Other cornerstone elements of the "Hemingway brand" included long-billed fishing hats, guayabera shirts, Breton fishing shirts, and earth-tone outfits. He typically wore dark brown suede sport jackets with notch lapels, light-colored subtly-patterned dress shirts, brown high-rise double forward-pleated trousers, light brown leather belts, and tan leather shoes. He often wore brown socks and gold cuff links.​

During his time in Paris and Spain, Hemingway dressed in the style of a macho adventurer comfortable at a Parisian café, Spanish bullfight, or African hunt. His fashion sense embodied outdoor lifestyle and adventure, influencing menswear's rugged tradition.​

CHARACTER Hemingway was driven, competitive, and obsessively disciplined about his craft. His code of conduct—stoicism, bravery, and grace under pressure—extended from his fiction to his personal life. Yet beneath his tough exterior lay deep insecurities and bouts of depression that shadowed his later years.

Hemingway's personality was complex and contradictory. He has been characterized as having Type 8 Enneagram traits (The Challenger), known for strong willpower, assertiveness, and desire for autonomy. He possessed a strong personality that often came across as dominant and even intimidating, with direct and straightforward communication.​ (4)

SPEAKING VOICE Hemingway's speaking voice was described as "thin, precise, high-timbered". When he spoke into telephones, his voice became constricted and the rhythm of his speech changed, as if talking with a foreigner. He advanced upon telephones with dark suspicion, virtually stalking them from behind, picking them up gingerly as if to determine whether something inside was ticking.​ (5)

In recordings from the late 1950s, his speech displayed his aggressive personality and sometimes inebriated style. He spoke slowly and carefully, including punctuation to aid transcription, sometimes reading from prepared text or reciting from memory. The bizarre mannerisms in later interviews may have been due to alcoholism combined with his attempts to hide its effects.​​

SENSE OF HUMOUR Hemingway's humor was often dark, mordant, and cynical. He liked elaborate, excessive insults and coined colorful phrases. 

He displayed humor even in serious situations. Recovering from war wounds in 1918, he claimed being wounded and surviving was "the next best thing to getting killed and reading your own obituaries". After his 1954 African plane crashes, when he did read his obituaries, he maintained: "I could never have written them nearly as well myself".​

Hemingway's works from the 1920s displayed wit in verse parodies, the burlesque novel The Torrents of Spring, mocking satire in vignettes, sophisticated comic dialogue in The Sun Also Rises, and black comedy in "The Killers". Even serious stories of love and death were streaked with wit. His humor lightened tragic elements in works like Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, and Across the River and into the Trees.​

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, General Golz says: "We are very serious so we can make very strong jokes". The dark humor in his novels, applied to situations decidedly not funny, highlighted the absurdity of war and life itself.​

RELATIONSHIPS Hemingway was married four times and had numerous affairs throughout his life.​

His first love was Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky (1892-1984), whom he met while being treated for war wounds in Milan in 1918. About ten years his senior, she wrote it off as innocent puppy love, and when she finally broke it off after Hemingway returned to the United States, he was devastated, leading to a depressive episode.​

First wife: Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1891-1979), married September 3, 1921 in Bay Township, Michigan, divorced 1927. They met in Chicago and married after a short courtship of less than a year. Red-headed Hadley unquestioningly believed in Hemingway's talent and her trust fund of $300/month helped the young couple get established in Paris. 

Richardson and Ernest Hemingway in Switzerland, 1922

They had one son, John Hadley Nicanor "Jack" Hemingway (nicknamed "Bumby," born October 10, 1923). By January 1926, Hemingway was involved in an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley set one condition for divorce: that Ernest and Pauline stay apart for 100 days without communication. They ignored this restriction, and Hadley released them from it on November 16, 1926. The Hemingways filed for divorce on December 8, 1926. 

Hadley later married journalist Paul Scott Mower in 1933, remaining married until his death in 1971. She died in 1979 and remained friends with Ernest until his death.​

Second wife: Pauline Marie Pfeiffer (1895-1951), married 1927, divorced 1940. A fashion journalist and fellow expat in Paris, Pauline was wealthy—her father was a major landowner in Arkansas and her uncles headed a lucrative pharmaceutical company. Uncle Gus supported the couple financially, buying them a house in Key West and funding their African safari. 

They had two sons: Patrick Miller Hemingway (born June 28, 1928) and Gregory Hancock Hemingway (later Gloria, born November 12, 1931). Patrick’s difficult birth inspired a key scene in A Farewell to Arms. Gregory, later known as Gloria after gender transition, died tragically in police custody. (3)

The marriage ended when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn in Key West. Pauline died in 1951.​

Pauline Hemingway in Paris, 1927

Third wife: Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), married 1940, divorced 1945. A successful journalist and war correspondent, Gellhorn met Hemingway in Key West in 1936 where she was vacationing with her mother and brother. They covered the Spanish Civil War together. Unlike previous wives, Gellhorn was openly competitive professionally with Hemingway and just as or even more ambitious and he resented her long absences for work. The marriage lasted only five years.​

Fourth wife: Mary Welsh (1908-1986), married March 14, 1946, until his death in 1961. Born in Minnesota, Mary was a journalist on assignment in London when she met Hemingway in 1944. Unlike Gellhorn, Welsh was considered bourgeoise and content with letting Hemingway steal the limelight. Both were married to other people when they met. 

Mary experienced a miscarriage in 1946. The couple lived in Cuba for over a dozen years. Hemingway fell in love with a young Italian woman (Adriana), which permanently damaged his relationship with Mary. As Hemingway's mental health declined, Mary signed the forms allowing him to get electroshock treatments in 1960. Riddled with guilt over his death, she drank heavily but managed to serve as his literary executor for posthumous works including A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden. Their marriage was the longest of his four: 15 years.​

Mary and Ernest Hemingway in Cuba

Hemingway had children with his first two wives: Jack with Hadley, and Patrick and Gregory with Pauline. All three sons survived him, though only Patrick lived to old age, dying in 2025 at age 97.​

His granddaughters, Mariel and Margaux Hemingway, carried his name into Hollywood, ensuring that, in more ways than one, the Hemingway legend endured.

In Paris, Gertrude Stein became Hemingway’s mentor, introducing him to the “Parisian Modern Movement” that was flourishing in the Montparnasse Quarter. Around the same time, he struck up a close friendship with James Joyce. Both men, along with other notable writers, frequented Sylvia Beach’s legendary bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l’Odéon — a hub for the city’s literary expatriates. (3)

Hemingway also formed a deep, if volatile, friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, his fellow American writer and drinking companion. Hemingway preferred his gin straight, while Fitzgerald took his in cocktails. As time went on, their friendship cooled: Hemingway’s star was rising as Fitzgerald’s dimmed under the weight of alcoholism. Hemingway grew disdainful of Fitzgerald’s willingness to trade artistic integrity for lucrative short stories in glossy magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and for screenwriting work in Hollywood. (3)

MONEY AND FAME In his early Paris years (1921-1922), Hemingway lived on a scant writer's income with sparse furnishings and no running water. During the first two years in Paris, Hadley's income had provided modest luxuries while Ernest earned good money as a journalist. Though Hemingway felt poor because he was living mostly on his wife's income, they were not as impoverished as he later portrayed in A Moveable Feast. His son Jack said they always had enough to eat and were confident their financial situation would improve.​

By 1927, when he married Pauline Pfeiffer, his circumstances changed dramatically. Not only was Pauline wealthy, but her family was even wealthier—her Uncle Gus bought them a house in Key West and funded their African safari. They lived in a swish apartment in Paris next to the Luxembourg Gardens, a stark contrast to his first years with Hadley.​

Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), began a literary career that brought both acclaim and wealth. But his fame truly exploded with The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). By the 1930s and ’40s, he was a household name, celebrated for his rugged lifestyle as much as for his prose.

During the Spanish Civil War, he donated $40,000 — much of his fortune at the time — to Spanish Medical Aid. Despite his generosity, Hemingway had an uneasy relationship with fame. He once survived solely on peanut butter sandwiches while working on a novel, showing that he valued work over luxury.

By 1953, The Old Man and the Sea brought him both the Pulitzer Prize and global recognition. The following year, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. After the Nobel, however, Hemingway wrote nothing more.

At the time of his death in 1961, Hemingway had a net worth of $1.4 million, equivalent to approximately $9.5 million in today's dollars. His works annually sell well into the seven figures.​

FOOD AND DRINK Hemingway was famous for his prodigious drinking habits. He was a man of big appetites—for life generally, and for food and drink specifically. His drinking was legendary, though he maintained high standards for his cocktails. He cared deeply about freshness of ingredients, preferring just-picked coconuts, limes, and mint. He went to great lengths to achieve ideal temperature for drinks, freezing martini glasses and creating giant ice cubes in tennis ball tubes in his deep freezer.​

His favorite cocktail was a dry martini, each seemingly drier than the last. In Across the River and Into the Trees, Colonel Richard Cantwell orders a Montgomery Martini: 15 parts gin to one vermouth. He made what he claimed was "the world's coldest martini," so cold "you can't hold it in your hand. It sticks to the fingers". 

He also loved Champagne, Daiquiris (without sugar, as he was diabetic), Absinthe, Negronis, and Gimlets. A common misbelief is that he loved Mojitos, but as a diabetic he took most drinks without sugar.​

He created his own cocktail named "Death in the Afternoon"—Champagne with a shot of Absinthe. In legend (though debunked by Hemingway), he was said to carry a pitcher of martinis to work. One tale claimed he drank 17 daiquiris in one sitting.​

He drank heavily throughout his life, and even more heavily after his 1954 African plane crashes left him in constant pain. By the 1950s, he was starting mornings with Chianti and progressing through large quantities of alcohol. Doctors warned him as early as 1937 to stop drinking due to liver damage, but he refused. In 1944, Martha Gellhorn found empty liquor bottles under his hospital bed. His drinking was a manifestation of desire for spiritual fulfillment, according to some interpretations.​

He traveled widely and "drank locally" wherever he went. His favorite bars included Sloppy Joe's Saloon in Key West, the Olympic Bar in Ketchum, Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore in Paris, La Floridita in Cuba, Museo Chicote in Madrid, Harry's New York Bar in Paris, the American Bar at The Savoy in London, and Harry's Bar in Venice (which he described as "almost a sacred place").​

Hemingway once appeared in an advertisement for Ballantine Ale, claiming it was “just what I need after fighting with a really big fish.”

MUSIC AND ARTS Hemingway's mother Grace was a well-known musician who taught him to play the cello. She took him to opera houses and museums in Chicago to help him appreciate the inner life that arts awakened. The relevance of music to Hemingway's style, works, and life ranged significantly, including opera's influence on his works. 

He moved easily among painters, poets, and composers, influencing and being influenced by modernist experimentation in all forms of art. His clipped prose style would later shape the rhythms of 20th-century storytelling, from cinema to songwriting.

WRITING CAREER Ernest Hemingway’s writing career began modestly enough, with Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923 — a slim little volume that hardly hinted at what was coming. Three years later, The Sun Also Rises made him the toast of Paris, or at least of those Americans who had fled there to drink cheap wine and argue about art while quietly falling apart after the war.

By 1929, Hemingway was rewriting A Farewell to Arms for the thirty-ninth time, a level of diligence that would make most writers take up plumbing instead. The novel, inspired by his doomed wartime romance with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, was promptly banned in Ireland for being “immoral and irreligious,” which, in those days, was practically a guarantee of literary success.

His father’s suicide cast a long shadow, and it found its way into Death in the Afternoon (1928), a book about Spanish bullfighting that was really about the human condition — and perhaps Hemingway’s ongoing argument with mortality. Then came his 1935 safari through East Africa, which produced Green Hills of Africa and two of his finest short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" — both brimming with death, heat, and existential exhaustion, which is to say, classic Hemingway.

When he turned his attention to To Have and Have Not (1937), about a mercenary at sea, Hollywood snapped it up, then largely ignored the plot. Howard Hawks’s film version, starring Bogart and Bacall, bore so little resemblance to the book that one suspects Hemingway might have thought it an elaborate prank.

He covered the Spanish Civil War with his usual mix of journalistic grit and literary swagger, turning his dispatches into For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), written in Havana, Key West, and Sun Valley — a geography that suggests he spent as much time chasing weather as inspiration.

Then came The Old Man and the Sea (1952), published in Life magazine, which sold five million copies in two days — a feat that left critics gaping and Hemingway briefly content. It won him the Pulitzer and secured his place in the pantheon of American letters, though he would have likely shrugged at the notion.

Hemingway’s short stories — “The Killers,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and others — remain marvels of economy, full of things left unsaid. His belief that “if a writer knows enough about what he is writing, he may omit things” revolutionized prose, inspiring generations of writers (and more than a few journalists) to say less, but better.

He sold film rights freely but despised the results, once calling The Snows of Kilimanjaro “The Snows of Darryl Zanuck.” Unlike Fitzgerald or Faulkner, he never wrote for Hollywood — though he was happy to take its money, a position that might best summarize Hemingway himself: principled, but not foolish.

LITERATURE  Hemingway pioneered a style that gave voice to the unspoken fears and longings of ordinary people — terse, honest, and emotionally charged. Critics dubbed it “Hemingwayese.”

He famously penned a six-word story said to contain an entire novel’s worth of sorrow:

“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”

A meticulous craftsman, Hemingway wrote standing up, using pencil on onion-skin paper — believing it best not to feel comfortable while writing. When the words flowed, he switched to the typewriter, aiming for about 500 words a day.

An early riser, he began work at dawn and wrote until noon, explaining:

“My mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast — talk them or write them down.”

His influence on literature remains profound — shaping generations of writers who sought to say more by writing less. (3)

NATURE Nature was at the heart of Ernest Hemingway’s life and art. He saw the natural world as a proving ground for courage, integrity, and self-reliance. Whether fishing in the Gulf Stream, hunting on the Serengeti, or walking through Idaho’s mountains, he approached nature as both muse and adversary.

The sea, especially, became a recurring symbol in his work — representing endurance and solitude. His deep respect for animals and the environment infused novels such as The Old Man and the Sea with spiritual weight. For Hemingway, the beauty and brutality of nature reflected the human condition itself.

Looking across Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains and the headwaters of the Salmon River from Galena Summit, he once said: "You'd have to come from a test tube and think like a machine to not engrave all of this in your head so that you never lose it". His passion for wilderness lives on in his family and in land use policies affecting the mountains, rivers, and streams of central Idaho.​

PETS Hemingway was famously devoted to animals. He owned scores of cats with names as colorful as their owner: Alley Cat, Boise, Crazy Christian, Dillinger, Mr. Feather Puss (trusted enough to “baby-sit” the Hemingways’ infant), Furhouse, and Pilar. (£0

While living at Finca Vigia in Cuba, he owned over 50 cats. Visitors would tell stories of kittens in the beds and the dinner table swarming with cats. He wrote observantly in For Whom the Bell Tolls: "No animal has more liberty than the cat," and certainly put this into practice as his cats enjoyed free reign over every room. He initially kept a spare bedroom as a specially designated cat room, but eventually had to cede his entire house to his freely roaming feline companions, feeding them generously from "cases of salmon" and drinking with them in the evenings, offering them a mixture of whiskey and milk.​

In the 1930s, he received a white polydactyl (six-toed) kitten named Snow White from sea captain Stanley Dexter. Sailors favored polydactyl cats, believing they were good luck—their extra toes enhanced their abilities as mousers and provided better balance on rough seas. Many of the cats at his Key West home (now the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum) are descended from Snow White. The museum is home to nearly 60 cats, about half of which have the physical polydactyl trait.​

Following Hemingway's tradition, all cats at the museum are named after famous people. The cats are capable of learning and responding to their names, particularly if they have an affectionate relationship with the person who calls them.​

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Hemingway was an accomplished outdoorsman equally at home stalking a lion through Africa's long grass and cruising the Gulf Stream in search of marlin and tuna. 

He learned to fish in freshwater streams and lakes of northern Michigan starting at age four or five. His father often took him fishing, and these experiences gave material for many short stories like "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Nick Adams Stories". 

He loved big-game fishing, particularly for marlin, and won every deep-sea fishing competition in 1935 in the Key West-Havana-Bimini Triangle. He caught a record-breaking Black Marlin in 1934 which he presented to the Miami Deep Sea Fishing Club.

Hemingway was fascinated with the technology and mechanics of fishing and wrote about it superbly well. 

Ernest, Pauline, and Hemingway children pose with marlins after a fishing trip in Bimini in 1935

Hemingway was an accomplished hunter who had learned to handle a gun at a young age. His interest varied between pheasant and duck shooting in the West to big game safaris in East Africa. He hunted with P.H. Percival, a guide who had also hunted with Theodore Roosevelt. He made multiple safaris to Africa and expressed uncontainable excitement planning his second major hunt in 1954.​

He participated in boxing in high school and used it as a way of drawing attention to himself. He was known to enjoy boxing throughout his life.​

Hemingway became fascinated by bullfighting during his trips to Pamplona starting in 1923. He visited Pamplona every year between 1923 and 1927, timing his stay with San Fermín, the city's bullfighting festival. He viewed bullfighting as having ritual significance comparable to the Mass, writing to Maxwell Perkins that it was "the one thing that has, with the exception of the ritual of the church, come down to us intact from the old days". He wrote extensively about bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932).​

In high school he competed in track and field, water polo, and football. 

He famously said there are only three true sports: "bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games".​

SCIENCE AND MATHS Hemingway approached both nature and craft with a methodical, almost scientific precision. His deep understanding of fishing, ballistics, and navigation showed a practical curiosity about how things worked.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Hemingway was raised in the Congregational faith in Oak Park. While recovering from war wounds in 1918, he turned to Catholicism through the influence of Catholic priest Father Bianchi at a religious retreat in Italy. An Italian priest anointed him in the rite of extreme unction after he was wounded, and Hemingway considered July 8, 1918, a day of spiritual rebirth—"the day he had stared down death and was 'anointed' and absolved of his sins". From then on, he called himself Catholic.​

His conversion was sincere, not merely pressed upon him by circumstances. He described his faith to Thomas Welsh: "In first war...really scared after wounded and very devout at the end. Belief in personal salvation or maybe just preservation through prayers for intercession of Our Lady and various saints that prayed to with almost tribal faith". 

A friend in the 1920s felt Hemingway "was a very strong Catholic. His religion came mainly from the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He told me several times that if there were no Bible, no man-made Church laws, the apparitions proved beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church was the true church".​ (9)

Hemingway converted again formally before his 1927 marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. However, he never wanted to be known as a "Catholic writer" because he felt he couldn't live up to the responsibility and had never set a good example. 

His spiritual sensibilities were the foundation of everything he wrote, and despite his own weaknesses and flaws, his Catholic spirituality infused his writing. Hemingway's hunger for holiness drove him to both the Church and the bull ring.​

Hemingway’s personal philosophy leaned toward moral pragmatism rather than religious orthodoxy. He famously declared, “What is moral is what you feel good after.” His worldview blended stoicism, sensuality, and fatalism, shaped by war and experience more than by dogma.

POLITICS Hemingway held strong leftist political convictions throughout his life, though he was protective of his political views and shied away from didacticism in his work, making his political points subtly. As a young man, he sympathized with the Socialist Party in America, and his first and only vote was cast for Eugene V. Debs, a socialist leader who ran for presidency five times. His political opinions only leaned further left as he grew older.​

The 1930s saw his political involvement during the Spanish Civil War. When he went to Spain in 1937 to cover the war as a journalist, he began with a more neutral approach but openly became a strong supporter of the Republican cause. He then worked as a political commentator for the magazine Ken, openly espousing an antifascist view, clearly breaking with his previously neutral approach to world affairs. This position continued with the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls.​

He expressed sympathies for Castro when he overthrew Batista, viewing it as the underdog winning against an overlord controlled by the United States. However, these sympathies vanished as soon as it became clear what Cuba became under Castro. He left Cuba when they announced they would expropriate foreigners and always criticized the Soviets. 

Hemingway harbored deep mistrust of U.S. authorities — particularly the Internal Revenue Service — and developed a fear of telephones, believing they might be tapped. Friends dismissed this as paranoia, but decades after his death, declassified FBI files confirmed he had been under heavy surveillance for nearly twenty years.

SCANDAL Hemingway's personal life was marked by numerous scandals and controversies:​

He had affairs while married to all four of his wives. While married to Hadley, he began an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who was their mutual friend. The affair became known through the Left Bank gossip mill, and everyone wondered if Hemingway was also sleeping with Lady Duff Twysden during the 1925 Pamplona trip that inspired The Sun Also Rises. While married to Pauline, he had an affair with Martha Gellhorn. While married to Mary Welsh, he fell in love with a young Italian woman named Adriana, which permanently damaged his marriage.​

Pauline "stole" Hemingway from Hadley by becoming her best friend, infiltrating their household, and seducing him. Martha Gellhorn then "stole" Hemingway from Pauline after a chance meeting in Key West. Those who "live by the sword, die by the sword"—Pauline generally gets little sympathy for this reason.​

His hedonism and volatility fascinated — and scandalized — his contemporaries. Yet they also fed the myth of Hemingway as a man who lived life to the hilt, without apology or restraint.

MILITARY RECORD After graduating high school in 1917, Hemingway applied for military service but was repeatedly rejected from the U.S. Army because of poor eyesight. Instead, in 1918 he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross motor corps and was stationed in Italy.​​

On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was seriously injured at Fossalta di Piave when an Austrian Minenwerfer mortar shell exploded just feet away from him. The explosion killed an Italian soldier and blasted Hemingway unconscious. Two hundred twenty-seven shards of metal (shrapnel) pierced his flesh, tearing into both legs. Heedless of his injuries, he worked to get Italian troops to safety.​

He was decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, spending months in a Red Cross Hospital recovering. The Italian government awarded him the Silver Medal of Bravery (Italian Silver Medal of Valor). He also earned an Italian war cross, apparently in recognition of service during an Italian campaign in the mountains in late October 1918. The U.S. later awarded him a Bronze Star for courage displayed while covering the European theater during World War II.​

Hemingway in Milan in 1918

 During World War II, Hemingway took on the role of war correspondent, but did much more than just report. For nearly a year, he converted his 38-foot fishing boat Pilar into a Nazi submarine hunting ship in disguise. His submarine patrols did relatively little to help the war effort.​​

Hemingway was on board a landing craft in the English Channel on June 6, 1944, during the Normandy invasion, though as a war correspondent he was denied permission to leave the boat. The following month, he attached himself to the U.S. Army's 22nd Infantry Regiment during their march to Paris. Near the village of Rambouillet, seeing the bodies of American soldiers compelled him to put down his pen and pick up a gun. He rallied a group of French resistance fighters and led the guerrilla outfit into Rambouillet, finding the village abandoned and loaded with German booby traps, which he reported to the 22nd Infantry.​

His position as a journalist was merely a way for him to get involved in the fighting. From his days in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway had been a premature anti-fascist, and his fighting against the Germans in World War II was a natural extension of his ideological and political beliefs. His wartime experiences had a significant impact on his writing and public image.​​

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Ernest Hemingway’s health was marked by numerous injuries, illnesses, and ultimately severe mental and physical decline. Throughout his life, he weathered a host of ailments — malaria, dysentery, skin cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes — all of which took a cumulative toll on his body and mind.

His physical suffering began early and was compounded by a long list of accidents and war wounds. During World War I, shrapnel from a mortar explosion left 227 metal fragments embedded in his legs and permanently damaged his left elbow. Over the years, he suffered at least six major concussions, two of them in consecutive years, which brought on headaches, mental fogginess, ringing in his ears, and almost certainly traumatic brain injury.

In 1954, Hemingway narrowly survived two plane crashes in Africa within forty-eight hours. These accidents ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidneys; dislocated his shoulder; crushed vertebrae; sprained limbs; and caused first-degree burns over much of his body. The second crash fractured his skull and resulted in cerebral fluid leaking from his ear. The pain that followed was constant and excruciating, and he coped with it by drinking more heavily than ever.

Another serious but undiagnosed condition that plagued Hemingway was hemochromatosis — a genetic disorder that causes excessive iron to build up in the blood, leading to joint pain, liver cirrhosis, heart disease, diabetes, and depression. This illness runs in families and may help explain the tragic pattern of suicides among his relatives: his grandfather, father, brother, sister, and granddaughter all took their own lives.

Psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Farah later theorized, in Hemingway’s Brain (2017), that the author also suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated concussions. Farah argued that Hemingway’s CTE was compounded by alcoholism, untreated diabetes, and hypertension — a combination that likely contributed to vascular dementia and cognitive decline. (11)

After 1954, Hemingway’s health worsened dramatically. His injuries and illnesses accumulated until they affected nearly every part of his body — head, heart, liver, back, and circulatory system. By 1959, the decline was unmistakable. He could no longer mask his depression or suicidal impulses. Writing, once his solace, became an exhausting ordeal as his creative clarity faded.

Yet even as illness consumed him, Hemingway maintained his lifelong belief in physical fitness. He judged his condition by how heavy a gun felt in his hands — “If it’s heavy, you’re out of condition. When it’s light, you’re in shape.” Whenever he noticed weight gain or weakness, he drove himself to exercise, a discipline he had cultivated since his youth.

In his final years, Hemingway’s decline accelerated. He was hospitalized twice for depression and, in November 1960, was persuaded to enter the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. There, doctors diagnosed him with bipolar depression and psychosis. He underwent at least fifteen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy, which erased much of his short-term memory and offered no relief. He was prescribed Librium, a new sedative then considered promising, but his condition continued to worsen. In April 1961, during a plane refueling stop in South Dakota, Hemingway reportedly tried to walk into a moving propeller, only to be saved when the pilot cut the engine in time.

Within three months, Hemingway ended his life in Ketchum, Idaho — the final act of a man whose extraordinary vitality had been slowly eroded by pain, illness, and despair.

HOMES Hemingway lived in numerous residences throughout his life:

Oak Park, Illinois (1899-1917): Born and raised in this affluent Chicago suburb.​

Paris, France (1921-1928): Moved to Paris in December 1921 with his wife Hadley to work as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. They first stayed at Hotel d'Angleterre at 44 rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement. From 1922-1923, the Hemingways lived in a small two-room apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the 5th arrondissement, where he wrote "My Old Man" and the famous A Moveable Feast. A musette ball on the ground floor enlivened this working-class district near Place de la Contrescarpe. With his second wife Pauline, he lived in a swish apartment in the rue Férou next to the Luxembourg Gardens.​

Key West, Florida (1928-1940): In 1928, while living in Paris, Hemingway ventured to Key West to pick up a Ford Roadster, a wedding gift from Pauline's wealthy Uncle Gus. They had to wait three weeks for the car while living in an apartment on Simonton Street, where he finished A Farewell to Arms. 

Uncle Gus then purchased the house at 907 Whitehead Street for them in 1931 for $8,000. The Spanish Colonial home, originally built in 1851 by marine architect Asa Tift, had been abandoned and boarded up. Ernest and Pauline restored the decaying property and made several additions and lived there with their two sons until 1940. During his time at this home, Hemingway wrote some of his best-received works, including Green Hills of Africa (1935), "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936), To Have and Have Not (1937), and Islands in the Stream (1970). He owned the property until his death in 1961. 

After the Hemingways' divorce and deaths, the house was auctioned off and converted into a private museum in 1964. On November 24, 1968, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.​

907 Whitehead Street By Andreas Lamecker

Havana, Cuba (1939-1960): Hemingway's first extended visit to Cuba was in April 1932 for a 65-day fishing trip. When his wife Pauline visited from Florida, they stayed at the Ambos Mundos Hotel in central Havana, particularly room 511, where he wrote some of For Whom the Bell Tolls. 

By 1939, he moved to Cuba with Martha Gellhorn to a 15-acre property called Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm) outside Havana. The house had a lived-in feel even as a museum and contained mementos and items the notorious pack-rat refused to throw out. He lived there for over a dozen years, eventually joined by his fourth wife Mary. He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea there and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 while living in Cuba. 

Hemingway and Mary left Cuba in 1960 following Fidel Castro's overthrow of the Batista government. Mary was able to return briefly to retrieve some belongings, but the house soon fell into disrepair and was partially restored and reopened to the public in 2007.​

Ketchum, Idaho (1939-1961): Hemingway first arrived in Ketchum in 1939 with Martha Gellhorn while still married to Pauline. They stayed at the Sun Valley Lodge, a mile north, where resort owners offered celebrities free lodging in exchange for publicity. He worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in the mornings, hunted in the afternoons, and fell in love with the countryside, which reminded him of Spain. He returned twice with Martha and after World War 

II with Mary. In 1959, Ernest and Mary bought a house in Ketchum on a hillside above the Big Wood River from Bob Topping for $8,000. The concrete structure was painted to look like a log cabin and had very modern amenities including a movie projector, television with remote control, air conditioning, and double Thermador ovens, with huge picture windows providing stunning views of surrounding mountain ranges. It was at this home that he died.

TRAVEL Restless and adventurous, Hemingway lived much of his life on the move. From the battlefields of Europe to the plains of Africa, from Paris cafés to Cuban fishing villages, he sought places that would test and inspire him. His travels informed nearly every major work he produced, lending authenticity and scope to his fiction.

Wherever he went, Hemingway immersed himself in the local life — boxing with dockworkers, fishing with captains, and drinking with bar regulars. Travel, for him, was both research and escape.

Hemingway in the cabin of his boat Pilar, off the coast of Cuba, c. 1950

DEATH Ernest Hemingway died by suicide on July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, at 7:30 a.m.. He was 19 days shy of his 62nd birthday.​​

The night before his suicide, he and Mary had a night together where Hemingway serenaded her with an old Italian folk song and they danced a little before going to bed. He had been discharged from his second stay at the Mayo Clinic in late June after undergoing at least 15 rounds of electroshock therapy. He arrived home in Ketchum on June 30, 1961.​​

On the morning of July 2, Hemingway got out of bed around 7 a.m., put on his favorite Italian robe, found the key to the basement storeroom where his guns were kept (which his wife had tried to hide from him), took out his favorite double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often "it might have been a friend," went upstairs to the front entrance foyer, and shot himself in the forehead. He had "quite deliberately" unlocked the basement storeroom, gone upstairs, and killed himself with the shotgun.​ (13)

The gunshot woke Mary, who rushed downstairs and found Ernest dead in the foyer. She called the police and initially told them the gun had unexpectedly gone off while Hemingway was cleaning it. She also called their friend Dr. Saviers. Initial reports framed it as a tragic accident.​

However, there was controversial speculation about suicide from the beginning, as he had been a skilled hunter who knew how to handle guns, making an accidental discharge unlikely. Years later, Mary told The New York Times: "No, he shot himself. Shot himself. Just that. And nothing else". In her autobiography How It Was, Mary painfully described his sad ending, recalling how she had found him holding a shotgun one morning in April 1961 and wondered if they had been "more cruel than kind in preventing his suicide then and there".​

Suicide ran in Hemingway's family—his grandfather, father, brother, sister, and granddaughter all killed themselves, possibly related to the hereditary hemochromatosis that caused depression.​

He is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, his final resting place.​

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Hemingway has been portrayed in numerous films, documentaries, and television productions:

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick created Hemingway, a six-hour, three-part PBS documentary (2021) examining his life and work.

Hemingway (1988) was an excellent mini-series directed by Bernhard Sinkel, with Stacy Keach delivering a magnificent performance as Hemingway, carrying the entire series with power and conviction and making the transition from virile young man to old man suffering from five brain concussions. The series featured extensive location shooting everywhere important in Hemingway's life and concentrated on his troubled emotional life with vivid portraits of his relationships with his four wives. Josephine Chaplin portrayed Hadley, Marisa Berenson played Pauline Pfeiffer, Lisa Banes played Martha Gellhorn, and Pamela Reed portrayed Mary Welsh.​

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) starring Clive Owen depicted his relationship with his third wife.

Numerous films have been based on Hemingway's writings, most famously To Have and Have Not (1944) starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, directed by Howard Hawks​ and The Old Man and the Sea (1958) starring Spencer Tracy, with multiple other versions produced​

The Old Man and the Sea was adapted into opera by Paola Prestini, Royce Vavrek, and Karmina Šilec, premiering at Arizona State University in 2023 and performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in October 2025.​

In 1957, Hemingway worked with producer John Houseman on a CBS program The Seven Lively Arts, adapting his Nick Adams stories for television, which led to Paul Newman's breakout role.​

Hemingway appeared in a Mercedes-Benz TV commercial using archive footage.​

ACHIEVEMENTS Pulitzer Prize: Awarded in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Awarded in 1954.

Silver Medal of Valor (Italian Government): Received for his bravery in World War I.

Created a seminal, minimalist writing style that greatly influenced modern prose fiction.

Sources: (1) IMDB (2) The Kansas City Star (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia (4) Boo World (5) Library of Congress Blogs (6) Difford's Guide (7) Sun Valley magazine (8) Church Life Journal (9) American The Jesuit Journal (10) Hemingway's Birthplace (11) Quiet Minds (12) Art of Manliness (13) Hemingway Omeka (14) The Lady