07.08
On this date in American literary history – July 8, 1918, Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded while carrying a companion to safety on the Austro-Italian front during World War I. Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. After the war, he married Hadley Richardson and they moved to Paris, where they met other American expatriate writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. With their help and encouragement, Hemingway published his first book of short stories in 1925, followed by the well-received The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Hemingway would marry three more times, and his romantic and sporting epics would be followed almost as closely as his writing. During the 1930s and 1940s, the hard-living and drinking Hemingway lived in Key West and then in Cuba while continuing to travel. He worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1952, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, his first major literary work in nearly a decade which won a Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. That same year, Hemingway was seriously injured in a plane crash, from which he never fully recovered suffering from severe anxiety and depression. Like his father, he eventually committed suicide, by shooting himself at his Idaho home in 1961.
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of numerous books that include America’s Literary Legends: The Lives and Burial Places of 50 Great Writers.
