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.
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