Hemingway Born: Master of Modern American Prose

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899, the son of a doctor who took him fishing and hunting before he could read. Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises at 27 and A Farewell to Arms at 30, two novels that redefined American prose by stripping it down to its bones. Short sentences. Concrete nouns. The important things left unsaid. He worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I and was wounded by mortar fire at eighteen, an experience that shaped his fiction and his psychology for the rest of his life. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist and used the experience for For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was present at the liberation of Paris in 1944, arriving at the Ritz Hotel ahead of the French troops, according to his own account. He was shot at in three wars, survived two plane crashes in Africa in consecutive days in 1954 (the second while traveling to get medical treatment for injuries from the first), and was hospitalized seventeen times over the course of his life. He wrote standing up, in pencil, usually in the mornings, tracking his daily word count on a chart. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. A journalist once asked him what he considered the most essential gift for a good writer. He said: "a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." His iceberg theory of writing held that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer's job was to know everything about a subject and then leave most of it out. His later years were marked by depression, alcoholism, paranoia, and physical decline. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy at the Mayo Clinic in 1960-1961, which he said destroyed his memory and his ability to write. He shot himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. He was 61. His posthumously published works, including A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden, continued to appear for decades.