Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 and grew up in Illinois, the son of a physician father and a musician mother. His father later committed suicide.

From The Old Man and the Sea:

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish… Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

An accomplished athlete and writer for the school newspaper, Hemingway left early for a job in journalism. It was as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star that he learned to write lean prose and avoid adjectives, habits that would later inform his literary work.

At eighteen, he drove an ambulance in Italy during World War I and was seriously wounded in action. During his recuperation, he fell in love with a nurse whose rejection hurt him deeply.

Once recovered, he took a job at the Toronto Star before moving to Chicago, where he met Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. They married in 1921 and moved to Paris. There, as a foreign correspondent, he became friends with Gertrude Stein. In 1923, his son was born, and Hemingway traveled to Pamplona, Spain, and witnessed bullfighting for the first time. Return trips inspired his masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, written in eight weeks and published in 1926.

For inventing a new minimalist literary vernacular (short, rhythmic sentences with no adjectives), Hemingway was lauded; for his exploits as an adventurer and soldier, he was viewed as a paragon of (now old-fashioned) machismo. In the end, his body wracked by injuries from surviving multiple plane crashes, paranoid and unable to write, he shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Includes beloved classics such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” An invaluable treasury.

Mojito

Hemingway wrote extensively in his fiction about many different drinks, including the daiquiris and mojitos he consumed in great quantity in Cuba, where he lived from the 1930s until 1960.

1¼ oz. rum

12 mint leaves

Crushed ice

1 tbsp. sugar

1/2 oz. lime juice

2 oz. soda

Lime wedges

Place mint leaves in bottom of glass. Add sugar and muddle. Then add white rum (can be spiced rum too), lime juice, crushed ice, and soda water. Garnish with limes and mint leaves. Serves 1.