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His childhood
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21st, 1899 in Oak Park. Oak Park is a very wealthy suburb in the west of Chicago. He is the second out of six children, his older sister's name is Marcelline and his younger sister's names are Ursula, Madelaine and Carol. His youngest brother was called Leicster. His mother Grace Hemingway, born as Grace Hall, was feministic and talented in music, so she organised a chorus and her husband cooked. His name is Eduard Hemingway and he worked as a doctor. He showed his son the beauty of free nature and taught him how to fish and hunt. In the short story "Fathers and Sons" Hemingway describes the relation to his father: Hunting this country for quail as his father had taught him, Nicholas Adams started thinking about his father. When he first thought about him it was always the eyes. The big frame, the quick movements, the wide shoulders, the hooked hawk nose, the beard that covered the weak chin, you never thought about - it was always the eyes. They were protected in his head by the formation of the brows; set deep as though a special protection had been devised for some very valuable instrument. They saw much farther and much quicker than the human eye sees and they were the great gift his father had.
And later: Nick was very grateful to him for two things; fishing and shooting. His father was as sound on those two things as he was unsound on sex, for instance, and Nick was glad that it had been that way; for some one has to give you your first gun or the opportunity to get it and use it(...) he loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father. It was a passion that had never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to know it.
Ernest Miller Hemingway attented high-school in the Oak Park High, where he graduated as the best of 150 scholars. In his final exam he had As in all subjects, in History, Chemistry, English and Latin. As a consequence he got the nickname "Hemingstein", that he didn't loose till he died. In school he wrote for the newspaper and participated in the football, in the cross country and in the swimming teams, later he took boxing lessons. Furthermore he was member of the discussion group " The Burke Club" and he belonged to the rifle association and to the school orchestra. There he played the cello. He was so impressed by a story by Richard Harding Davis that as a consequence he decided to become a journalist against the will of his father and his grandfather. They wanted him to join a university as they and his sisters did to hold the academic tradition.
After finishing high school he was planning to start work as a journalist at the "Kansas City Star" after the summer break. His family spent their holidays at Wallon Lake as they did every summer for Ernest's whole life.
First job and military service
When he started to work for the Kansas City Star in 1917, his subjects were the police, the hospital and the station and these topics would influence his whole poetry. Another journalist there had just returned from France, so Hemingway wanted to get there too, but he wasn't taken for the military service because of bad eyes. So he joined the ambulance. On April 30th, 1918 he left the newspaper after only seven months. The atmosphere there was captured in the stories "A pursue" and "In our time".
In May he was sent to Europe. He arrived in Bordeaux and passing Paris he was sent to Mailand. There they had to help Italy after its defeat in Caporetto. He worked in Schio in the East of Lake Locarno and after three weeks he chose to help in a kitchen close to the frontline. He described his work in Italy later in the book "A Farewell to Arms": In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops, arching along the road and the dust rising and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves............
On July 8th, 1918 he was seriously wounded by a grenade. Although his leg was hurt, he was able to carry another injured person to the ambulance, later he was awarded two medals, the "Croce di Guerra" and the "Medaglia d'Argento al Valore", which was one of the highest possible medals. But first he had to cure his leg in hospital in Mailand. Later on he will tell somebody that there had been 227 metall splinters in his leg. In Mailand he fell in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who was seven years older than him. In autumn she was transferred to Treviso, but they went on writing letters. He returned to the United States in 1919 and they agreed that he should find work and then she would follow him and they would get married. But before he had found a suitable job, she wrote that she had fallen in love with an Italian and that she wanted to marry this other man. Hemingway wrote about her in "A very short story" and in the "A farewell to arms".
A farewell to arms
Ten years after he had left the frontline and Italy, he treated the war theme in this book. The main character is Fredric Henry, a young American who works for the ambulance voluntarily. After being wounded he returns to the front exactly when the Austrians had won the battle at Caporetto. He is accused of desertion and is to be shot, but he was can flee to Switzerland. In a hospital he gets to know the English nurse Catherine Barkley and they fall in love. After fleeing together they enjoy only a short time together. She dies in child-birth. Fredric Henry has become a symbol for a real man who is defeated several times, in the war and in his love, but who still goes on and doesn't give up. Many people of that generation recognised themselves in the main character. The first edition in 1929 was sold more than 90.000 times.
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