Ernest Hemingway Biography Quotes 76 Report mistakes
| 76 Quotes | |
| Born as | Ernest Miller Hemingway |
| Occup. | Novelist |
| From | USA |
| Spouses | Hadley Richardson (1921–1927) Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1940) Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945) Mary Welsh (1946–1961) |
| Born | July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois, USA |
| Died | July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho, USA |
| Cause | Suicide by gunshot |
| Aged | 61 years |
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a conservative suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician who introduced his son to hunting and the outdoors; his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician who insisted that all her children study music and cultivate discipline. The dual influence of nature and art, along with the tensions it produced in the household, deeply marked Hemingway's sensibility. After attending Oak Park and River Forest High School, where he wrote for the school newspaper and learned the tight focus of journalistic prose, he briefly worked as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. The paper's style guide, with its emphasis on short sentences, vigorous English, and accuracy, would echo throughout his fiction.
World War I and Apprenticeship
In 1918 Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Near Fossalta di Piave he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, an experience that left physical scars and furnished material for later stories and A Farewell to Arms. He recovered in Milan, where he formed relationships with nurses and fellow volunteers and observed the costs of modern war. Returning to the United States, he married Hadley Richardson in 1921. The couple moved to Paris soon after, a choice that placed him at the center of an extraordinary literary and artistic circle.
Paris and the Lost Generation
In Paris, Hemingway befriended Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to painters and writers and famously described his cohort as the Lost Generation. Ezra Pound encouraged his discipline and pruning of excess; Sylvia Beach, the bookseller at Shakespeare and Company, offered support and community. He struck up a complicated friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose success both inspired and challenged him. During these years Hemingway honed the spare, declarative style often called the iceberg theory, where surface detail suggests deeper meaning. His first important collection, In Our Time, and the novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms established his voice and themes: courage, ritual, desire, and the fragility of idealism.
Breakthrough and Domestic Upheaval
The Sun Also Rises (1926), drawn from his trips to Spain with Hadley and friends, captured the rhythms of expatriate life and the code of bravery in bullfighting. As his reputation grew, his marriage faltered. He divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. With Pauline he moved to Key West, where he fished the Gulf Stream, absorbed the talk of sailors and bartenders, and wrote with relentless routine. Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms (1929) consolidated his standing. He worked closely with editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner's Sons, who championed his manuscripts and buffered his battles with critics.
Key West, Africa, and the Span of Nonfiction
The 1930s widened Hemingway's canvas. He traveled to Spain to study bullfighting, producing Death in the Afternoon, and made a safari to East Africa with Pauline, yielding Green Hills of Africa and vivid short stories like The Snows of Kilimanjaro. His friendships ranged from fellow writer John Dos Passos to guides, captains, and craftsmen; the boat Pilar and his association with Cuban captain Gregorio Fuentes rooted his seafaring life. He mastered the technicalities of fishing and hunting and translated them into precise prose, treating expertise as a moral test.
Spain at War and Moral Reckoning
As a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway reported from Madrid and the front lines, working alongside Martha Gellhorn and photographers such as Robert Capa. He supported the Republican cause and helped on the documentary The Spanish Earth. The experience culminated in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel that probes the costs of political commitment and the dignity of doomed resistance. His marriage to Pauline ended; he married Gellhorn in 1940, but their union, shaped by competition and travel, was brief.
World War II and After
Hemingway covered World War II from the North Atlantic to France, accompanying American troops after D-Day and during the liberation of Paris. He was known for taking risks beyond the usual remit of a correspondent, which attracted both admiration and reprimand. After the war he married Mary Welsh, a fellow journalist. He published Across the River and into the Trees (1950), met with mixed reviews, and then achieved a late triumph with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a spare tale of endurance inspired by Cuban fishermen. The book brought him the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1954, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Cuba, Crashes, and Decline
From the late 1930s through 1960, Hemingway kept a home, Finca Vigia, near Havana, where he wrote in the mornings and fished in the afternoons. In 1954 he survived two successive plane crashes in East Africa while on safari with Mary Welsh, sustaining serious injuries that aggravated long-standing physical and psychological strains. He continued to revise manuscripts and manage an archive of material, but his health eroded. Friends like A. E. Hotchner observed the alternation of genial storytelling and deepening despair, a polarity intensified by illness and the pressures of fame.
Personal Life and Family
Hemingway had three sons: John (known as Jack or Bumby) with Hadley Richardson, and Patrick and Gregory with Pauline Pfeiffer. The responsibilities and separations of family life threaded through his movements from Paris to Key West, from Cuba to Idaho. The suicide of his father in 1928 weighed on him, and the family's genetic and medical vulnerabilities complicated his later years. Colleagues such as editor Maxwell Perkins, publisher Charles Scribner Jr., and friends from Paris, Key West, and Havana formed a constellation that alternately steadied and challenged him.
Final Years and Death
Political shifts in Cuba and medical concerns prompted Hemingway to leave Finca Vigia in 1960. He underwent treatment, including electroconvulsive therapy, for severe depression and other ailments. Settling in Ketchum, Idaho, he struggled to work and to maintain the routines that had sustained him. On July 2, 1961, he died by suicide at his home. He left behind manuscripts that would later appear posthumously, including A Moveable Feast, which recalled the camaraderie and creative ferment of Paris.
Legacy and Style
Hemingway's influence rests on the clarity and compression of his prose, the way he stripped sentences to bone and trusted readers to infer the submerged mass of emotion and implication. He forged archetypes of courage and restraint while exposing their ambiguities. Writers as different as Raymond Carver and Joan Didion learned from his rhythms; journalists absorbed his insistence on precision; readers returned to his characters for their flawed decency and stoic grace. Surrounded in life by artists, editors, lovers, and rivals, from Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, he transformed an era's travels and wars into enduring literature that still speaks in a lean, exacting voice.
Our collection contains 76 quotes who is written by Ernest, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.
Other people realated to Ernest: Ambrose Bierce (Journalist), J.D. Salinger (Novelist), Edmund Wilson (Critic), Andre Malraux (Author), Thomas Wolfe (Novelist), John Donne (Poet), Bill Vaughan (Journalist), Spencer Tracy (Actor), Muriel Rukeyser (Poet), Archibald MacLeish (Poet)
Ernest Hemingway Famous Works
- 1961 The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Short Story Collection)
- 1952 The Old Man and the Sea (Novel)
- 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Novel)
- 1937 To Have and Have Not (Novel)
- 1929 A Farewell to Arms (Novel)
- 1926 The Sun Also Rises (Novel)
- 1925 In Our Time (Short Story Collection)
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