Ernest Hemingway
By: Michelle Lovelidge
Facts!
1 Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois – a suburb of Chicago that has also been home to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
2 Hemingway met J.D. Salinger during World War II. Salinger was fighting with the 12th Infantry Regiment.
3 Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, about his life in Paris in the 1920s, was not published until 1964.
4 Hemingway’s son, Patrick, worked as a big-game hunter and ran a safari business in Tanzania.
5 Hemingway only wrote one play called The Fifth Column and it is set during the Spanish Civil War.
6 Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery under-fire in World War II when he was a war correspondent.
7 Hemingway left trunks of material in the Paris Ritz in 1928 and did not recover them until 1957.
8 The FBI maintained an open file on Hemingway from World War II onwards.
9 Hemingway’s sister and brother, and also his father committed suicide as well.
10 Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary are buried in Ketchum’s town cemetery in Idaho.
11. His writing style became an inspiration for many crime and pulp fiction novels.
12. He was a failed KGB Spy
13. Ernest once took a urinal home from his favorite bar and moved it into his home, arguing that he had “pissed away” so much of his money into the urinal that he owned it.
14. Ernest Hemingway survived through anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, skin cancer, hepatitis, diabetes, two plane crashes (on consecutive days), a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, a crushed vertebra, a fractured skull, and more.
15. Ernest Hemingway killed himself with his favorite shotgun bought from Abercrombie & Fitch.
16. In the Florida Keys, there are a lot of 6-toed cats, because Ernest Hemingway’s cat “got around” a lot.
17. Hemingway’s brother founded a nation off the coast of Jamaica that consisted of a raft and 7 citizens. It had currency, postage, and a constitution.
18. There’s an Ernest Hemingway lookalike society that holds yearly contests.
19. From his infancy, Hemingway's mother begins a strange habit of dressing her son like a girl, complete with dresses and long hair, and his older sister as a boy, with overalls and cropped hair. When Ernest is six, she finally ends the charade and allows him to cut his long hair. The damage has already been done. In adulthood, his friend John dos Passos will describe Hemingway as the only man he ever knew who truly hated his mother.
20. Ernest Hemingway was known to use a machine gun on sharks to stop them eating his catch, and in 1938 he established a world record by catching seven marlin in one day.