Ernest Hemingway
Biography
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As a baby, his mother would dress him in pink dresses and flowers and grew his hair out long and encouraged him to play with dolls and called him Ernestine.
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The author nicknamed himself "Papa" at the age of 27.
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When prohibition came in the U.S. in 1920, he took a job in Canada.
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5 of the Hemingway family committed suicide, him, his father, his sister and brother, and his grand-daughter.
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Ernest Hemingway owned an estate near Havana in Cuba for over 20 years.
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At one time, he had homes in Key West, Havana, Spain, and Ketchum, Idaho.
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Hemingway had 3 sons, Patrick, John, and Gregory.
He also had 3 grand-daughters, Joan, Margaux, and Mariel.
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At the age of 61 he killed himself with a gun-shot to the head, just as his father killed himself.
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Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.
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He also won the Pulitzer prize in 1953, for, The Old Man and the Sea.
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Ernest wrote regularly for his school newspaper, The Trapeze. He mainly wrote humorous articles using the writing style of Ring Lardner.
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He liked to think of writing in terms of competing with other authors, living and dead.
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The one author he said he would never go up against was Leo Tolstoy.
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He said the best rules for writing were the ones he received while working on the Kansas City Star newspaper. "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."
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During WWI, Hemingway drove an ambulance in Italy for American Red Cross. Later a bomb and exploded and he was seriously injured.
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His novel, A Farewell to Arms, was based on his time in WWI.
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Hemingway's picture appeared on a commemorative postage stamp in the United States in 1989 as a part of the Literary Arts series.