Waldmeir, Joseph J.

Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park (Ill.), the son of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall-Hemingway. He had five siblings. The family summered at Walloon Lake near Petoskey (Mich.). After his high school graduation, Hemingway served as a volunteer ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He was wounded by an Austrain Trench mortar in July 1918, and recovered in Milan and the U.S., to which he returned in Jan. 1919. Beginning in 1920, Hemingway sold his stories to the Toronoto Star on a piece by piece basis. In 1921 he married the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson, with whom he had a son, John H. N. They lived in Paris and Toronto. In 1926 Hemingway wrote his break through novel, The Sun also rises. Several other novels soon followed. After Hadley divorced him, Ernest married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. They had two sons together, Patrick and Gregory. The Hemingways enjoyed Key West (Fla.) fishing and lived in Paris and Key West. In 1940 Pauline divorced him. Ernest then moved to Havana (Cuba), where he married Martha Gellhorn. In 1945, he divorced Martha. Hemingway married Mary Welsh Monks in Havana in1946. They lived in Italy and Cuba, and traveled throughout Europe and Africa. After the Cuban Revolution they lived in Idaho. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway killed himself. Hemingway is considered the greatest American author of the 20th century. He wrote many novels, essays, a film, and play, and reported on the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Many of his movies were sold for film rights for huge sums of money. In 1953, Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Old man and the sea. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. (This information is from American National Biography Online.)