Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July, 1899, the first son of Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway and the second of their six children. Clarence Hemingway was a medical doctor with a small practice in Oak Park, Illinois; his wife was a music teacher with an active interest in church affairs and Christian Science. As a boy, Hemingway seemed to enjoy the best of both worlds. He grew up close to metropolitan center in a suburban or semi-rural community that was also sheltered by distance from the violence and vice of Chicago itself. Moreover, Dr. Hemingway owned a cabin in northern Michigan where his oldest son spent summers developing a life-long passion for hunting and fishing apart from middle-class society. …show more content…
When America entered World War II at the end of 1941, Hemingway assumed the self-appointed post of an anti-submarine scout, using his fishing boat the "Pilar" to search for Nazi U-boats that might enter coastal waters around Cuba and Florida. In 1944, he went to the headquarters of the West European war effort in London and he accompanied Royal Air Force crews on bombing missions against the Nazis. Following the Allied invasion of Normandy in June of that year, Hemingway attached himself to the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division in the campaign to liberate France, acting as a scout and as an interrogator; he was awarded a Bronze Star for his service. In Europe, however, Hemingway also drank heavily. He was involved in a car crash that his wife attributed to the influence of alcohol. Martha Gelhorn divorced Hemingway in late 1944. Within months, he married Mary Welsh, a war correspondent, in …show more content…
In 1950, Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway's first full-length work in a decade appeared in print. It enjoyed only modest commercial success. Not only did serious literary critics find the book disappointing, many began to suggest that its author's talent had suffered irreversible erosion. But Hemingway proved them wrong. Upon his return to Cuba, he plotted out a multi-part sea novel. Although draft portions of this opus would be published after Hemingway's death as Islands in the Stream, in 1951, he abandoned this grand vision and focused on one section of the project. The result was The Old Man and the Sea (1952). The text of Hemingway's fourth major novel first appeared in a November, 1951 special issue of Life magazine. It was both a popular sensation, selling over five million copies in a matter of days, and a major literary achievement for which he would the Nobel Prize in 1954.
Hemingway was unable to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremonies. He was recuperating from injuries sustained in two successive airplane crashes while he was on one of his many African safaris. In the wake of the second and more serious crash, it was initially reported that Hemingway had been killed. It was later reported that Hemingway emerged from the bush with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. We know for certain that he suffered