Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds "Doc Ed" Hemingway, a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Miller Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway's mother once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds".[1] His mother had wanted twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months older) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further "feminised" her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine", but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females.[2] Many themes in Hemingway's work point to destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. "Hills Like White Elephants"), within marital unions (cf. "Now I Lay Me", "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, no connection between Hemingway's depiction of these human conditions and his own early childhood experiences has been established.
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsman hobbies of hunting, fishing and camping in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and athletically; he boxed, played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and yearbook, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.[3]
After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."[4] In honor of the centennial year of Hemingway's birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway its top reporter of the last hundred years.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as well as the veterans of World War One later known as "the Lost Generation", as described in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. ("'That's what you are. That's what you all are,' Miss Stein said. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.'" Stein had overheard a garage owner use the phrase to criticize a mechanic.) He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature[citation needed].