Hemingway Dies: American Literature Loses Its Boldest Voice

Ernest Hemingway died by suicide in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. Born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, he had been receiving electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic, treatment his friends said destroyed his memory and his ability to write. The man who had defined masculine restraint in American prose, the iceberg theory of writing where everything important lies beneath the surface, sat at his typewriter and couldn't manage a paragraph. He couldn't finish a sentence for the inscription at the Kennedy Library. He was 61. His father had killed himself with a .32 revolver in December 1928. His literary career began as a reporter for the Kansas City Star at age 18, followed by service as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I, where he was severely wounded by a mortar shell at age 18. His early novels, "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms," established the spare, declarative style that influenced virtually every American writer who followed. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, hunted German submarines in the Caribbean during World War II, and was present at the D-Day landings and the liberation of Paris. "The Old Man and the Sea," published in 1952, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His health deteriorated in his final years. A series of plane crashes in Africa in 1954 left him with injuries from which he never fully recovered. He drank heavily throughout his life. The depression that had stalked his family, which also claimed his brother Leicester, his sister Ursula, and his granddaughter Margaux, finally consumed him. The shotgun was his father's.