The Sun Also Rises (Author Biography)

Author Biography

One of the greatest authors of American literature, Hemingway had modest beginnings in the town of Oak Park, Illinois, where he was born to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway in 1899. Young Hemingway pursued sports with his father and arts with his mother without distinction. In 1917, after graduating from high school, he took a junior position at the Kansas City Star where he was given a reporter's stylebook that demanded brief, declarative, and direct sentences. Hemingway became the master of this style and adapted it to literary demands.

In 1918 he volunteered for service in World War I and served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. This experience later served as the source material for A Farewell to Arms. His legs were wounded and he was sent home. His convalescence took place over several months at the family cabin in Michigan. When he recovered, he took a position as companion to a disabled boy in Toronto in 1920. There, he again entered the world of writing through the Toronto Star. After marriage to Hadley Richardson, he became a Parisian correspondent with the paper.

He and his wife left for Paris where Hemingway associated with those known as the "Lost Generation" (James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford). His first publishing success was a short story entitled "My Old Man" in 1923. For the next few years he continued to meet literary figures (F. Scott Fitzgerald among others) and edited a journal with Ford Madox Ford. In 1925 he began work on The Sun Also Rises which reflected his life in Paris among the "Lost Generation." He also wrote The Torrents of Spring at the same time. Both were published the following year.

With the success of A Farewell to Arms in 1929, Hemingway traveled quite a bit. He frequented Cuba, Florida, and France, contributed money for ambulance service in the Spanish Civil war, and also covered the war for The North American Newspaper Alliance. In 1940 he married his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, and published For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway and Gellhorn then went to China where he became a war correspondent with the United States Fourth Infantry Division. There he met Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1945.

Hemingway continued to publish until 1952 when The Old Man and the Sea crowned his extraordinary career. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for this story. Unfortunately, by the mid-1950s his adventurous life had taken its toll. Hemingway became depressed and spent time in various hospitals. Finally, he returned from a stay in the Mayo Clinic on June 30, 1961, to his home in Ketchum, Idaho. There he used a favorite gun to commit suicide on July 2.