Ernest Hemingway
Interesting Facts
- Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois – a suburb of Chicago that has also been home to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
- Hemingway met J.D. Salinger during World War II. Salinger was fighting with the 12th Infantry Regiment.
- Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, about his life in Paris in the 1920s, was not published until 1964.
- Hemingway’s son, Patrick, worked as a big-game hunter and ran a safari business in Tanzania.
- Hemingway only wrote one play called The Fifth Column and it is set during the Spanish Civil War.
- Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery under-fire in World War II when he was a war correspondent.
- Hemingway left trunks of material in the Paris Ritz in 1928 and did not recover them until 1957.
- The FBI maintained an open file on Hemingway from World War II onwards.
- Hemingway’s sister and brother, and also his father committed suicide as well.
- Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary are buried in Ketchum’s town cemetery in Idaho.
Ernest Hemingway won a Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.
12. In 1952, Hemingway went on safari to South Africa where he was almost killed in TWO successive plane crashes!
13. He was seriously wounded in World War I by mortar fire.
14. Hemingway's marriage to Hadley Richardson and affair with Pauline Pfeiffer inspired the novel, The Paris Wife.
15. His most famous works include The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
16. He liked to fish the trout streams of the upper peninsula of Michigan, specifically Fox River.
17.He also owned multi-toed cats in Italy and they had so many offspring that now, multi-toed cats are called
18. As a boy, Hemmingway spent the summers with his family in the woods of northern Michigan, where he often accompanied his doctor father on house calls. His father commited suicide several years later which left young Hemmingway with a deep emotional scar.
19. His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
20. Hemmingway suffered from alcholism and depression. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems — and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and continued paranoia. He attempted suicide in the spring of 1961 and received ECT treatments again. He committed suicide (shot himself) on July 2, 1961.