"DESTROYED BUT NOT DEFEATED"
The Life of Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea recounts a human being's struggle against the natural world. From the harsh conditions he endures, to the bodily injuries he incurs, to the loss of his fish - his hard-won livelihood - Santiago constantly contends with nature and, ultimately, must submit to it.

This struggle was central to Hemingway's own life as well.

Averse to quietude even when writing, he perpetually (indeed, recklessly) pursued physical risk and rigor. And like the hero of his own beloved novella, the pursuit would be inescapably destructive.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, IL. The second of six children, he studied music with his mother, a former singer.

But he preferred to be outdoors with his father, a doctor, who taught young Ernest to shoot by age three and took him hunting, fishing and camping in the Michigan woods.

In high school, Hemingway was a fair athlete, a good student and an exceptional editorialist for the newspaper and yearbook. After graduation, he defied his parents by taking a reporting job with the Kansas City Star instead of going to college.

Upon turning 18, just after US entry into WWI, Hemingway tried to enlist but was deferred from the military due to poor vision. He joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and was sent to Italy in May 1918, but was badly wounded by a mortar shell in July. He returned to Chicago, began writing for the Toronto Star, and married Hadley Richardson.

In 1921 the Star dispatched Hemingway to Europe, so he and Richardson found humble quarters in Paris. For extra money, he hired himself out as a boxing partner.

Hemingway's journalism brought him into a literary circle of American expatriates and, at the encouragement of this "Lost Generation," Hemingway shifted his focus to fiction. He debuted in 1925 with short story collection called In Our Time; in 1926 he published his breakthrough first novel, The Sun Also Rises - which centers on American expats in post-WWI Europe.

Hemingway's growing professional success coincided with personal challenges: he divorced Hadley in 1927 and married wealthy fashion writer Pauline Pfeiffer. He moved with Pfeiffer to Key West in 1928 and, shortly thereafter, learned that his father had committed suicide. Hemingway nonetheless completed A Farewell to Arms (loosely based on his time in Italy during WWI) for publication in 1929.

Disinclined to settle down, In 1930 Hemingway took a camping trip to Wyoming and Montana and shattered his writing arm in an automobile accident. The following year, he tried bullfighting in Spain and wrote about it in Death in the Afternoon.

He went on safari in the Serengeti in 1933 (the subject of 1935's Green Hills of Africa) until contracting amoebic dysentery. The next few years found him fishing in the Caribbean on his boat the Pilar, working on To Have and Have Not and frequenting bars in the Bahamas.

The 1937 outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sent Hemingway back to journalism and back to Spain. His experience inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls and introduced him to fellow correspondent Martha Gellhorn who, unlike Pfeiffer, shared his anti-Franco convictions. After Franco's triumph, Hemingway divorced Pfeiffer and married Gellhorn, with whom he settled on a large estate just outside Havana.

When WWII began, Hemingway and his boat were recruited by the US Navy (despite Gellhorn's disapproval) to look for German submarines in the Gulf. The couple soon returned to Europe to cover the war, but professional differences (and a drunken car accident) increased Gellhorn's disapproval; she filed for divorce in 1945.

Hemingway remarried the same year. He returned to Cuba with his new wife - Mary Welsh, another fellow war correspondent he met abroad - and plans for several new novels. But the novels remained largely unfinished, and the one he did publish - Across the River and into the Trees, in 1950 - was poorly reviewed. In 1952, however, one section of an intended maritime trilogy was printed in Life magazine. The story - called The Old Man and the Sea - was subsequently published as a novella and won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize.

In 1954 Hemingway embarked on a second African safari. He narrowly avoided injury when his plane crash-landed during a sightseeing trip, but he was less lucky on a second airplane two days later. In the latter crash he suffered a cracked skull, spinal damage, a dislocated arm, ruptured spleen, impaired vision and extensive burns - prompting some newspapers to print his obituary prematurely.

The injuries left Hemingway unable to travel to Stockholm later that year to accept the Nobel Prize. Weakened by the pain and depressed by his unproductiveness, his drinking increased and his health deteriorated.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution, his communist sympathies brought him under investigation, so he abandoned his beloved Havana and relocated to Ketchum, ID, to focus on recovery. But memory loss from a course of electroshock therapy left Hemingway unable to write.

He attempted suicide in early 1961 and was given another electroshock treatment. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway tried again; he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the hallway of his Idaho home.

Several of Hemingway's unfinished works were published posthumously, including A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970) The Nick Adams Stories (1972), The Dangerous Summer (1985) and The Garden of Eden (1986).

Though physically destructive, his lifelong pursuit of new experience left legend in his wake: in Cuban fishing villages and Key West clubs, Paris bookshops and the bull runs of Pamplona, Midwestern newspapers and Western wilderness. His injuries and accidents had damaged his body but inspired his writing; "a man can be destroyed," as he affirms in the The Old Man and the Sea, "but not defeated."