Ernest Hemingway
By: Wilson Williams
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 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.
12 Ernest Hemingway enters Oak Park and River Forest High School. He proves to be an excellent student athlete who boxes, plays football and writes for the school newspaper and yearbook.
13 join the U.S. Army so that he can fight in World War I. The Army rejects him because of poor eyesight, so he volunteers as a driver with the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
14 The United States enters World War II. Hemingway volunteers for the Navy, outfitting his fishing boat Pilar with guns to hunt for German submarines off the coast of Cuba. Though he never fires at one, the military will still award him a Bronze Star for his service in 1947.
15 Pauline and Ernest travel to Kenya for a ten-week safari. Hemingway falls in love with the continent. His subsequent trips there inspire many works of fiction and nonfiction, including the 1935 book Green Hills of Africa and the short stories "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."
16 Hemingway hardly ever – if ever – got a real “hangover.”
17 He Only Truly Loved Polydactyl - SIX TOED CATS
18 Hemingway Survived Not One, but TWO Plane Crashes.
19 He Could Write a Short Story… in SIX WORDS
20 Ernest Hemingway Hunted Sharks