A Very Short Story

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1889. Upon his graduation from high school, he briefly worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before leaving the US to join the war effort on the Italian front of World War I. He served as an ambulance driver, but in 1918, he suffered a serious leg injury. After a stay in an army hospital in Milan, Italy, and successful surgery to treat his injury, he returned home, but not before having an intense romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse who treated him in the hospital. This love affair served as the basis of “A Very Short Story” and was also treated in Hemingway’s works “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway become an American literary icon known for both the understated concision of his prose, which was honed during his early career as a journalist, and his exploits as a sportsman, adventurer, and larger-than-life personality. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954).

In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. He returned overseas with her, working as a columnist for the Toronto Star in Paris. His work as a reporter served as the foundation of Hemingway’s writing style, as he strived to create the sort of polished, vigorous, laconic style characteristic of clear and factual newspaper writing. In Paris, Hemingway joined the coterie of expatriate modernist writers and artists who came to be known as the “Lost Generation.” Indeed, the term was popularized by Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph of his successful debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), as a reference to the spiritual disorientation and lack of direction of the postwar generation.

In the ensuing years, to support his burgeoning writing career and travels across Continental Europe, Hemingway continued his work as a journalist. He specialized as a wartime correspondent, covering both the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Normandy landings and liberation of Paris in World War II. These various phases of his life were punctuated by different marriages and defined by his literary efforts and travels. His experiences in the Spanish Civil War, for example, served as the basis for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). While he spent much of his career in Europe, he also maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba. During his time in the Caribbean and on a big game expedition to Africa in 1954, Hemingway pursued his interests as a sportsman and fisherman, at one point holding the world record for catching seven marlins in a single outing. He suffered from chronic ill health, however, following a series of serious plane accidents during his trip to Africa and several serious car accidents in the 1940s. His health problems were compounded by decades of very heavy drinking. Hemingway died by suicide in 1961 in his home in Ketchum, Idaho.