Hemingway Chronology

1899 Ernest Miller Hemingway is born in Oak Park, Illinois, the second child of Dr. Clarence E. Hemingway (Ed) and Grace Hall Hemingway

1900 EH goes with family to their summer cottage in northern Michigan

1899/

1902 EH dressed in girl’s clothes as Marcelline’s twin

1905 EH enters first grade with year-older sister Marcelline

1917 EH graduates from Oak Park High School in June; takes a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star in October

1918 in May EH sails to Europe to assume duties as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy; is badly wounded in Fossalto on July 8 while distributing chocolate and cigarettes to troops; meets and falls in love with nurse Agnes Von Kurosky while recuperating in Milan

1919 EH returns to US; receives a “Dear John” letter from Agnes, saying he is too young

1920 EH quarrels with his mother, who banishes him from Windemere (family vacation house in Northern Michigan) shortly after his 21^st birthday

1921 EH marries Hadley Richardson on September 3; provided with letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, the newlyweds leave for Paris after Thanksgiving, where EH writes dispatches for the Toronto Star and begins to write seriously

1922 EH meets expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein; in December Hadley takes a train to Lausanne and en route loses a suitcase (stolen) containing the manuscripts to all of EH’s unpublished fiction

1923 EH goes to Spain for bullfights in Pamplona; briefly returns to Toronto for birth of his son, John Hadley (Bumby) in October; publishes Three Stories and Ten Poems in limited edition

1924 EH assists Ford Maddox Ford in editing transatlantic review, which prints “Indian Camp”; brings out slim in our time volume

1925 EH publishes In Our Time, containing several stories in northern Michigan depicting maturation of Nick Adams; in May meets and befriends F. Scott Fitzgerald

1926 Fitzgerald sends EH to Scribner’s and editor Maxwell Perkins, and the two (writer and editor) begin a life-long association, beginning with The Torrents of Spring (satiric attack on Sherwood Anderson and other writers) and The Sun Also Rises, one of his most famous novels

1927 EH publishes Men Without Women, a story collection that includes “Hills like White Elephants” and “The Killers”; is divorced by Hadley and marries Pauline Pfeiffer

1928 EH leaves Paris and moves to Key West; son Patrick is born; Dr. Hemingway kills himself with a .32 revolver

1929 EH publishes A Farewell to Arms in September; receives good reviews and sales, despite Boston censorship of serialized version in Scribner’s Magazine

1930 EH breaks arm in auto accident

1931 Son Gregory Hancock is born

1932 EH publishes Death in the Afternoon (non-fiction bullfighting book)

1933 EH publishes Winner Take Nothing, a book of stories that includes “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; goes to Africa for a safari, the setting for his two famous stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (both published in 1936)

1934 EH publishes The Green Hills of Africa (big-game hunting and safaris)

1937 EH serves as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War; contributes funds

to Loyalist cause; publishes To Have and To Have Not, his most overtly political novel

1938 EH publishes The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, comprising a play about the war in Spain and his stories to date

1939 EH separates from Pauline; moves to Finca Vigia, a house near Havana

1940 EH marries Martha Gelhorn; publishes For Whom the Bell Tolls, his best-selling

novel about the Spanish Civil War

1942 EH outfits his boat Pilar to hunt German U-Boats in the Caribbean (no encounters)

1944 As a war correspondent, EH observes D-Day and attaches himself to the 22^nd Regiment, 4^th Infantry for operations leading to the liberation of Paris; begins relationship with news reporter Mary Walsh

1945 EH is divorced by Martha in December

1946 EH marries Mary in March; they live in Cuba and in Ketchum, Idaho

1950 EH publishes Across the River and into the Trees, a novel about a December-May relationship savagely attacked by critics

1951 EH publishes The Old Man and the Sea, novella about the trials of Santiago, an old

Cuban fisherman; novella was published in its entirety in Life

1952 EH returns to Africa for safari with Mary; wins Pulitzer Prize

1953 In January, EH is severely injured in two separate plane crashes and is reported dead

erroneously in several accounts; awarded the Nobel Prize

1959 EH in declining health but observes bullfights in Spain for his 60^th birthday

1960 EH undergoes shock treatment for depression; on July 2 EH kills himself with a

shotgun at his Ketchum home

1964 A Moveable Feat is published posthumously, a memoir of his early years in Paris

1970 Islands in the Stream is published, a semi-autobiographical novel

1972 The Nick Adams Stories is published (includes previously unpublished stories)

1981 Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters is published

1985 The Dangerous Summer is published (bullfighting); Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches is published

1986 The Garden of Eden, a substantially cut and rearranged version of a manuscript is published; the story recounts the love affairs of two women and one man, which causes many EH critics to revise opinions about EH’s macho image

1987 The Complete Short Stories is published

Hemingway’s Prose Style:

Most critics agree that Hemingway’s fame depends as much on his prose style as on his content and subjects. His early style is lean, laconic, and devoid of strings of adjectives and adverbs. Lacking excessive modifiers, his sentences tend to be simple or compound declarative clauses; conjunctions are coordinating, rarely subordinating, so that items are arranged spatially or sequentially (not by cause or logic—Hemingway’s world is ruled more by fate and luck than by cause and effect and logic). The prose depends on nouns (many monosyllabic) for concrete imagery. There is a poetic use of repetition (learned in part from the bible and in part from Gertrude Stein) and a concentration on surface detail, on suggesting character through things said and done rather than through authorial asides and psychological analysis. Like his Imagist contemporaries, especially Ezra Pound, Hemingway sought the concrete detail that would capture the essence of the moment and convey its emotional content to readers. His bare-bones style is in part a reaction to the over-ornate Victorian prose and to the political rhetoric surrounding World War I. Obviously influenced by the techniques of journalism, it is also an attempt to strip away all that is false, misleading, and unessential. Among the elements that Hemingway shares with other Modernist writers are alienated characters and their rejection of conventional moral standards, a manner of presentation that, in its incomplete and fragmented manner, echoes the sense of a pervasive social disintegration. Often cited is Hemingway’s “iceberg” technique, where vital elements of a story are left out in order to force greater reader engagement (even rereading). The actual text read by readers is only the tip of the “iceberg”: readers are left to ponder what lies beneath.

Hemingway on his iceberg technique:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have the feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.