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The Private Lives of Authors: Ernest Hemingway

By October 6, 2017Authors, Literature

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois in the USA in 1899.

He was guided by his parents to enjoy the fruits of a suburban, middle class life with music lessons, and regular trips to the lakes and woods of North Michigan. His father would take Ernest for hunting and fishing trips, and these excursions would influence his profound love of nature, often reflected in his later work.

Despite professing his dislike for his musician mother, Ernest attributes the rhythm and contour of his writing to his musical background. Hemingway biographer Michael S. Reynolds explains how Hemingway in fact mirrored his mother’s vivacity. Perhaps their similarities partly caused Ernest’s scorn for his mother.




Ernest Hemingway’s first introduction to the life of a writer was at Oak Park and River Forest High School where he studied journalism during his junior year. The class was structured as a newspaper office would be with students submitting pieces to the school newspaper, The Trapeze.

Much like Mark Twain and other writers, Ernest left school and became a newspaper journalist before dipping his toe into the world of fiction. He spent 6 months at The Kansas City Star, and the writing style they insisted upon became quite influential on the young writer:

“Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

World War I saw Ernest with the Italian Front, aiding others with The Red Cross, and being awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery for his deeds. After being badly wounded at only 18 years old, Ernest was forced to spend much time recuperating, and reflecting on his own mortality:

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you … Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”

Ernest Hemingway’s early love life seemed to influenced his later experiences greatly. At the age of 18 he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse who eventually broke his heart, subsequently he tended to leave women before they abandoned him.

In 1920 Ernest fell in love with another woman, Hadley Richardson, and they soon moved to Paris where “the most interesting people in the world”  lived. It was there that Ernest met writers of excellent standing such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Throughout his travels Ernest Hemingway kept writing and in the early 1920s his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published.

It wasn’t until Ernest had met F. Scott Fitzgerald and read The Great Gatsby that he decided his next writing must be a novel.

Hemingway ended up marrying 4 times during his life, and apparently had multiple mistresses…

Even though Ernest had many loves in his life, only one was constant- his love for the feline.

In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway was gifted a polydactyl (six-toed) cat by Stanley Dexter, a ship’s captain. Sailors believed that six-toed cats were good luck, especially since their extra toes could help them keep balance on deck, and aid them in the capture of dastardly mice!

Ernest adored his cat, Snow White, and allowed it to breed yet more polydactyl mitten kittens, many of whom are still alive and living in The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum. Each descendant of Snow White carries the polydactyl gene even if they do not show physical signs of it. To carry on the tradition Ernest started, the museum patrons name each cat after a famous person, just as great cat lover himself had.

Ernest Hemingway’s home in the 1930s is now used as a museum, and home to many polydactyl cats. Ernest lived there throughout the 1930s until 1940 when he and his second wife divorced, and he left for Cuba. The home stayed in the family until the death of Hemingway in 1961 and was purchased by a jewellery store owner named Bernice Dixon. She lived in the home until the mid-60s when she decided to turn the main house into a Hemingway museum. After her death her family gained the estate and have kept the museum running, including all the cats!

The hurricane that battered parts of the USA in 2017- hurricane Irma- thankfully didn’t cause any damage to the museum, or its 54 feline residents. They hunkered down with their humans inside the home while the winds raged outside. The museum curator attributed their safety during the storms to the home’s hardy limestone block walls.

Such an inordinate amount of fascinating things happened to Ernest Hemingway in his life- far too much to write about in one succinct report here. A recent biography written by Mary V. Dearborn is recommended for all the juicy details.

A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Mary Dearborn’s new biography gives the richest and most nuanced portrait to date of this complex, enigmatically unique American artist, whose same uncontrollable demons that inspired and drove him throughout his life undid him at the end, and whose seven novels and six-short story collections informed–and are still informing–fiction writing generations after his death.”




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