Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway rewrote English prose style and killed himself at sixty-one. Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899 to a doctor and a musician, he worked briefly as a reporter on the Kansas City Star, whose style sheet — short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English — he said contained the best rules he ever learned. Rejected by the army for poor eyesight, he drove ambulances for the Red Cross in Italy and was severely wounded by a mortar at Fossalta in July 1918, at eighteen. He fell in love with a nurse who then left him, which produced A Farewell to Arms. He lived in Paris in the 1920s among the expatriates Gertrude Stein called the lost generation, and learned, he said, as much from Cézanne as from any writer. The Sun Also Rises in 1926 established the manner: declarative sentences, almost no adjectives, dialogue carrying the weight, and the significant material left out — his iceberg theory, that what is omitted strengthens what remains. He reported the Spanish Civil War, which produced For Whom the Bell Tolls, and attached himself to the American army in 1944, taking part in the liberation of Paris in a way that breached the rules for correspondents. The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 restored a reputation that had slipped, and he received the Nobel Prize in 1954. He survived two plane crashes in Africa in successive days, and was badly injured. He drank heavily for decades, suffered depression and paranoia, and had electroconvulsive treatment that destroyed his memory. He shot himself in Idaho in July 1961; his father had also killed himself.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history