At the time of Hemingway's graduation from High School, World War I

was raging in Europe, and despite Woodrow Wilson's attempts to keep

America out of the war, the United States joined the Allies in the fight
against Germany and Austria in April, 1917. When Hemingway turned
eighteen he tried to enlist in the army, but was deferred because of poor
vision; he had a bad left eye that he probably inherited from his mother,
who also had poor vision. When he heard the Red Cross was taking
volunteers as ambulance drivers he quickly signed up. He was accepted in
December of 1917, left his job at the paper in April of 1918, and sailed for
Europe in May. In the short time that Hemingway worked for the Kansas
City Star he learned some stylistic lessons that would later influence his
fiction. The newspaper advocated short sentences, short paragraphs, active
verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy. Hemingway later
said: "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.
I've never forgotten them."

Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then traveled to

Milan in early June after receiving his orders. The day he arrived, a
munitions factory exploded and he had to carry mutilated bodies and body
parts to a makeshift morgue; it was an immediate and powerful initiation
into the horrors of war. Two days later he was sent to an ambulance unit in
the town of Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918,
only a few weeks after arriving, Hemingway was seriously wounded by
fragments from an Austrian mortar shell which had landed just a few feet
away. At the time, Hemingway was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to
Italian soldiers in the trenches near the front lines. The explosion knocked
Hemingway unconscious, killed an Italian soldier and blew the legs off
another. What happened next has been debated for some time. In a letter to
Hemingway's father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest's fellow ambulance
drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of shrapnel being lodged in
Hemingway's legs he still managed to carry another wounded soldier back
to the first aid station; along the way he was hit in the legs by several
machine gun bullets. Whether he carried the wounded soldier or not,
doesn't diminish Hemingway's sacrifice. He was awarded the Italian Silver
Medal for Valor with the official Italian citation reading: "Gravely
wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an
admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered
generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the
same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until
after they had been evacuated." Hemingway described his injuries to a
friend of his: "There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the
front. I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body,
like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all
around and then came back and went in again and I wasn't dead any more."

Hemingway's wounding along the Piave River in Italy and his

subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the relationship with
his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his great novel A Farewell To
Arms.

A Soldier's Home...

When Hemingway returned home from Italy in January of 1919 he

found Oak Park dull compared to the adventures of war, the beauty of
foreign lands and the romance of an older woman, Agnes von Kurowsky.
He was nineteen years old and only a year and a half removed from high
school, but the war had matured him beyond his years. Living with his
parents, who never quite appreciated what their son had been through, was
difficult. Soon after his homecoming they began to question his future,
began to pressure him to find work or to further his education, but
Hemingway couldn't seem to muster interest in anything.

He had received some $1,000 dollars in insurance payments for his war
wounds, which allowed him to avoid work for nearly a year. He lived at his
parent’s house and spent his time at the library or at home reading. He
spoke to small civic organizations about his war exploits and was often
seen in his Red Cross uniform, walking about town. For a time though,
Hemingway questioned his role as a war hero, and when asked to tell of his
experiences he often exaggerated to satisfy his audience. Hemingway's
story "Soldier's Home" conveys his feelings of frustration and shame upon
returning home to a town and to parents who still had a romantic notion of
war and who didn't understand the psychological impact the war had had
on their son.

The last speaking engagement the young Hemingway took was at the
Petoskey (Michigan) Public Library, and it would be important to
Hemingway not for what he said but for who heard it. In the audience was
Harriett Connable, the wife of an executive for the Woolworth's company
in Toronto. As Hemingway spun his war tales Harriett couldn't help but
notice the differences between Hemingway and her own son. Hemingway
appeared confident, strong, intelligent and athletic, while her son was
slight, somewhat handicapped by a weak right arm and spent most of his
time indoors. Harriett Connable thought her son needed someone to show
him the joys of physical activity and Hemingway seemed the perfect
candidate to tutor and watch over him while she and her husband Ralph
vacationed in Florida. So, she asked Hemingway if he would do it.

Hemingway took the position, which offered him time to write and a
chance to work for the Toronto Star Weekly, the editor of which Ralph
Connable promised to introduce Hemingway to. Hemingway wrote for the
Star Weekly even after moving to Chicago in the fall of 1920. While living
at a friend's house he met Hadley Richardson and they quickly fell in love.
The two married in September 1921 and by November of the same year
Hemingway accepted an offer to work with the Toronto Daily Star as its
European corespondent. Hemingway and his new bride would go to Paris,
France where the whole of literature was being changed by the likes of
Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ford Maddox Ford. He
would not miss his chance to change it as well.

The Hemingways arrived in Paris on December 22, 1921 and a few

weeks later moved into their first apartment at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine. It
was a miserable apartment with no running water and a bathroom that was
basically a closet with a slop bucket inside. Hemingway tried to minimize
the primitiveness of the living quarters for his wife Hadley who had grown
up in relative splendor, but despite the conditions she endured, carried
away by her husbands enthusiasm for living the bohemian lifestyle.
Ironically, they could have afforded much better; with Hemingway's job
and Hadley's trust fund their annual income was $3,000, a decent sum in
the inflated economies of Europe at the time. Hemingway rented a room at
39 rue Descartes where he could do his writing in peace.

With a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway met

some of Paris’ prominent writers and artists and forged quick friendships
with them during his first few years. Counted among those friends were
Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Max Eastman,
Lincoln Steffens and Wyndahm Lewis, and he was acquainted with the
painters Miro and Picasso. These friendships would be instrumental in
Hemingway's development as a writer and artist.
 Hemingway's reporting during his first two years in Paris was extensive,
covering the Geneva Conference in April of 1922, The Greco-Turkish War
in October, the Luasanne Conference in November and the post war
convention in the Ruhr Valley in early 1923. Along with the political
pieces he wrote lifestyle pieces as well, covering fishing, bullfighting,
social life in Europe, skiing, bobsledding and more.

Just as Hemingway was beginning to make a name for himself as a

reporter and a fledgling fiction writer, and just as he and his wife were
hitting their stride socially in Europe, the couple found out that Hadley was
pregnant with their first child. Wanting the baby born in North America
where the doctors and hospitals were better, the Hemingways left Paris in
1923 and moved to Toronto, where he wrote for the Toronto Daily Star and
waited for their child to arrive.

John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was born on October 10, 1923 and by
January of 1924 the young family boarded a ship and headed back to Paris
where Hemingway would finish making a name for himself.

~~~

With a recommendation from Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford let

Hemingway edit his fledgling literary magazine the Transatlantic Review.
In recommending Hemingway to Ford, Pound said "...He's an experienced
journalist. He writes very good verse and he's the finest prose stylist in the
world."

Ford published some of Hemingway's early stories, including "Indian

Camp" and "Cross Country Snow" and generally praised the younger
writer. The magazine lasted only a year and a half (until 1925), but allowed
Hemingway to work out his own artistic theories and to see them in print in
a respectable journal.

An unparalleled creative flurry...

From 1925 to 1929 Hemingway produced some of the most important

works of 20th century fiction, including the landmark short story collection
In Our Time (1925) which contained "The Big Two-Hearted River." In
1926 he came out with his first true novel, The Sun Also Rises (after
publishing Torrents of Spring, a comic novel parodying Sherwood
Anderson in 1925). He followed that book with Men Without Women in
1927; it was another book of stories which collected "The Killers," and "In
Another Country." In 1929 he published A Farewell to Arms, arguably the
finest novel to emerge from World War I. In four short years he went from
being an unknown writer to being the most important writer of his
generation, and perhaps the 20th century.

The first version of in our time (characterized by the lowercase letters

in the title) was published by William Bird’s Three Mountain Press in 1924
and illustrated Hemingway’s new theories on literature. It contained only
the vignettes that would later appear as interchapters in the American
version published by Boni & Liveright in 1925. This small 32 page book,
of which only 170 copies were printed, contained the essence of
Hemingway’s aesthetic theory which stated that omitting the right thing
from a story could actually strengthen it. Hemingway equated this theory
with the structure of an iceberg where only 1/8 of the iceberg could be seen
above water while the remaining 7/8 under the surface provided the
iceberg’s dignity of motion and contributed to its momentum. Hemingway
felt a story could be constructed the same way and this theory shows up
even in these early vignettes. A year after the small printing of in our time
came out, Boni & Liveright published the American version, which
contains ten short stories along with the vignettes. The collection of stories
is amazing, including the much anthologized "Soldier’s Home," as well as
"Indian Camp," "A Very Short Story," "My Old Man" and the classic "Big
Two-Hearted River" parts one and two. "Big Two Hearted River" was a
eureka story for Hemingway, who realized that his theory of omission
really could work in the story form.

Next came The Torrents of Spring, a short comic novel that satired
Hemingway’s early mentor Sherwood Anderson and allowed him to break
his relationship with Boni & Liveright to move to Scribner’s. Scribner’s
published Torrents (which Scott Fitzgerald called the finest comic novel
ever written by an American) in 1925, then a year later published
Hemingway’s second novel The Sun Also Rises, which the publisher had
bought sight unseen.
The Sun Also Rises introduced the world to the "lost generation" and was a
critical and commercial success. Set in Paris and Spain, the book was a
story of unrequitable love against a backdrop of bars and bullfighting. In
1927 came Men Without Women and soon after he began working on A
Farewell To Arms.

~~~

While he could do no wrong with his writing career, his personal life had
began to show signs of wear. He divorced his first wife Hadley in 1927 and
married Pauline Pfeiffer, an occasional fashion reporter for the likes of
Vanity Fair and Vogue, later that year. In 1928 Hemingway and Pauline
left Paris for Key West, Florida in search of new surroundings to go with
their new life together. They would live there for nearly twelve years, and
Hemingway found it a wonderful place to work and to play, discovering
the sport of big game fishing which would become a life-long passion and
a source for much of his later writing. That same year Hemingway received
word of his father’s death by suicide. Clarence Hemingway had begun to
suffer from a number of physical ailments that would exacerbate an already
fragile mental state. He had developed diabetes, endured painful angina
and extreme headaches. On top of these physical problems he also suffered
from a dismal financial situation after speculative real estate purchases in
Florida never panned out. His problems seemingly insurmountable,
Clarence Hemingway shot himself in the head. Ernest immediately traveled
to Oak Park to arrange for his funeral.