Ernest Hemingway
Childhood Of Celebrities : Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, then Cicero, a suburb of Chicago (during his early life, the area in which Hemingway was born split from Cicero and became Oak Park in 1902). Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds “Doctor Ed” Hemingway, a country doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway’s father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had given birth to a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest’s widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.
Hemingway’s neurotic mother had considerable talent and had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had “wide lawns and narrow minds”. His mother had wanted to have a set of twins and when this did not happen, she dressed Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in girl clothes and also did their hair in the same style, keeping the image of “twins” in effect. Some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further “feminised” her son in his youth by calling him “Ernestine”, but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females. Many themes in Hemingway’s work point to destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. “Hills Like White Elephants”), within marital unions (cf. Now I Lay Me,The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, the connection between Hemingway’s depiction of these human conditions and his own early childhood experiences has not been presumptively established.
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father’s outdoorsman hobbies of hunting, fishing, and camping in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan’s Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.
Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and athletically; he boxed, played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was writing for “Trapeze” and “Tabula” (the school’s newspaper and original literary magazine, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.
After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star’s style guide as a foundation for his writing style: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” In honor of the centennial year of Hemingway’s birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway its top reporter of the last hundred years.
Credit : Wikipedia
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