Ernest Hemingway's Life and Image

Ernest Hemingway was born on a July morning in 1899.   Born at home in Oak Park, he was raised a conservative with strong values.   While his father taught him to hunt and fish, his mother taught him music, her former profession.   Though his mother’s music lessons helped him throughout his life, he didn’t particularly enjoy the lessons and spent as much time in the woods as he could manage.

Nature became Hemingway’s world, the place where he could go and pull from it the essence of his writing.   No matter what happened in his life he could always find refuge in a quiet meadow or a lulling forest.   Inspired by nature, Hemingway used it to form a force that became both a backing and almost a character in his books, that would speak to a reader and tell them that a story wasn’t over, simply because it never truly ends.

People look back at Hemingway’s life as if it was one of his novels.   He is not seen as a writer but as a personage of writing.   At a young age of 18, in 1917, Hemingway enlisted as an ambulance driver in World War I, after quitting his job at the Kansas City Star.   Hemingway didn’t make it three weeks into his service.   While in Schio, Italy, he was injured by an exploding mortar, perforating his legs with shrapnel.   In spite of this, it is said that he carried a wounded Italian to a first aid station; this earned him an Italian Silver Medal.  

For the next year, Hemingway used his insurance from the war to avoid work.   He would spend his time at the library or speaking about the war.   Eventually he met Harriett Connable while speaking, who saw Hemingway’s confidence and control.   Connable asked him to tutor her son.   He accepted, as her husband introduced Hemingway to the editor of the Toronto Star Weekly, who he wrote for even when he moved to Paris.   While in Paris he covered the Geneva Conference, and the Greco-Turkish War.   Hemingway and his first wife Hadley moved back to Toronto though, when she became pregnant.   In...