APPENDIX

A Timeline

1899 Born in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. One of six children.

1913 High school athlete and writer for school paper.

1917 Age 18, refuses college, becomes a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star whose terse “style sheet” influences his future writing.

1918 Age 19, as a Red Cross worker in Italy, he is almost killed by a mortar shell in World War One. Falls in love with an older nurse, Agnes Kurowsky. She rejects him as a “kid.”

1921 At 22 marries Hadley Richardson, the “Paris wife,” who is eight years older.

1922 Midwestern innocents, he and Hadley soak up a “modernist” atmosphere in Paris with much drinking and intramural sex. Lucky timing since this is the year of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and other expatriates help teach him the writing trade. Publishes first poems. Hadley loses suitcase of his manuscripts. Will he ever forgive her?

1923 First son, Jack (“Bumby”), is born.

1926 First novel, The Sun Also Rises, a sensation, on the “lost generation” of WWI.

1927 Hadley’s best friend, the wealthy Pauline Pfeiffer, steals Ernest and marries him. He is so guilty he gives Hadley royalties from The Sun Also Rises.

1928 Back in Illinois his father commits suicide. Ernest blames his “bitch” mother, Grace. He and Pauline move from Paris to Key West, Florida, where her rich uncle buys them a house. Second son, Patrick, born.

1929 A Farewell to Arms makes Ernest financially independent.

1931 Third son, Gregory (“Gloria”), born.

1932 Writes a book about his obsession, bullfighting.

1933 Goes on African safari, with Pauline whom he resents because she’s rich. Writes Africa-based “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” about men unhappy with their wives.

1937 Civil war breaks out in Spain. He throws himself in on the side of the antifascist “Loyalist” Republican government. He finances and narrates the propaganda film Spanish Earth.

1940 Divorces Pauline and marries journalist Martha Gellhorn. They move to Cuba where he’ll live for the next 20 years. He writes For Whom the Bell Tolls about the Spanish Civil War.

1941 on. After Pearl Harbor, goaded by Gellhorn, outfits his fishing boat as a Nazi submarine hunter patrolling the Gulf Stream. J. Edgar Hoover grows a Hemingway hate; Ernest detests Hoover’s FBI as an “American Gestapo.”

1944 Lands with D-Day troops in France. Leads a band of guerrillas to “liberate” Paris. Is nearly killed in the bloody Hürtgen Forest battle.

1945–46 Divorces Gellhorn and marries another journalist, Mary Welsh. She almost dies of a failed pregnancy, and he saves her life.

1950 At age 51, publishes Across The River And Into the Trees inspired by his crush on an 18-year-old Italian countess. The novel is blasted by critics.

1951 His mother Grace dies.

1952 Recovers his damaged reputation with the novella The Old Man and the Sea. Huge success. Life magazine devotes a whole issue. Its photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, travels to Cuba where he finds that Hemingway “drank from the moment he awoke until the time he went to bed … obsessed over his virility (sometimes literally pounding his chest, “like King Kong,”) and “crazy,” “berserk,” “wild,” “insulting,” and “blue in the face” (as in, blue in the face with sudden, uncontrollable anger).” Papa is losing it.

1953–54 First the Pulitzer and then the Nobel Prize. He’s too injured from two airplane crashes to accept the Swedish award in person.

1959–60 Fidel Castro comes to power in Cuba. Hemingway wishes him luck but departs with Wife #4, Mary, for the American West in Idaho.

1961 Age 62, he kills himself.