Ernest Hemingway

By Tom Kirvan

On July 8, 1918 – near the end of World War I – a little-known ambulance driver for the American Red Cross was struck by a mortar shell while serving on the Italian front. The explosion knocked the 18-year-old American unconscious and buried him in the earth of a bunker where just seconds before he was handing out chocolates to Italian soldiers. Two of the soldiers standing between the teen and the shell’s point of impact took the brunt of the blast, killing one instantly while the other died within a few hours from the injuries he suffered in the explosion.

If but for a few feet, the shell likely would have claimed another life – that of Ernest Hemingway, who would go on to become one of the greatest American novelists.

A native of Illinois, Hemingway was working as a reporter for The Kansas City Star when the war broke out in Europe in 1914. Within three years, Hemingway decided to volunteer for the Red Cross in France before the United States entered the war that lasted from 1914-18. His experiences during World War I would serve as the focus for one of his most noteworthy novels, “A Farewell to Arms,” which chronicles the love of a young American ambulance driver for a beautiful English nurse during the “war to end all wars.”

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway, who spent many summers during his youth in Northern Michigan, used his experiences as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War as the background for one of his most acclaimed novels, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1940. His novel “The Old Man and the Sea” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953.

Married four times, Hemingway was seriously injured in a pair of 1954 plane crashes, leaving him in pain and poor health for much of the rest of his life, which ended when he committed suicide at his home in Idaho in 1961 at the age of 61.

Known for his straightforward prose and his succinct writing style, Hemingway also wrote short stories, including a posthumous collection known as “The Nick Adams Stories,” published 10 years after the author’s death. Urban legend also has it that Hemingway penned a six-word short story that tells a mighty, poignant tale.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

He also was credited with these timeless quotes:

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
“I drink to make other people more interesting.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”