DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist short story writer and journalist. His economical and understated style which included his iceberg theory had a strong influence on 20th century fiction while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid 1920s and the mid 1950s and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published seven novels six short story collections and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels four short story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature. Hemingway was raised in Oak Park Illinois. After high school he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918 he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). In 1921 he married Hadley Richardson the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s Lost Generation expatriate community. Hemingways debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) which he covered as a journalist and which was the basis for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West Florida (in the 1930s) and in Cuba (in the 1940s and 1950s). He almost died in 1954 after two plane crashes on successive days with injuries leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959 he bought a house in Ketchum Idaho where in mid 1961 he died by suicide.