Ernest Hemingway is synonymous with masculinity. He was a war correspondent during World War II, where he gained the nickname “Papa” from the soldiers; was a well-documented fan of both bull-fighting and boxing, and a rugged outdoorsman. Hemingway was also consumed a lot of alcohol.
Profile viewers will note to the right “invulnerability.” During Hemingway’s lifetime, his legs took shrapnel from a mortar in Italy, impaled through the throat, struck in the forehead by a falling skylight in his own bathroom, bound his own broken arm after a car accident, concussed after another accident, drove himself from Paris to Luxembourg while experiencing pneumonia, survived two plan crashes, frostbite, and a gas-heater explosion, and punctured his liver. These, and other tests of his stamina, did not slow down his fiction output or his larger-than-life lifestyle.
Hemingway’s published work includes the short story, “The Killers,” which was influential on noir fiction, as well as the novels For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Garden of Eden among any others. The Dangerous Summer chronicles the summer of 1957 when he was sent to Spain as a journalist to write about bull-fighting. In 1922, a suitcase containing Hemingway stories was stolen from his wife Hadley during a train ride. The case was never recovered.
Hemingway was married four times, and had three sons. He is the grandfather of Mariel Hemingway and her late sister, Margaux. He had a friendship which may have bordered on the sexual with F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1961.