Ernest Hemingway

Ernie (1899-1940; full name Ernest Hemingway) was a citizen of the United States.

He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first son and the second of six children born to Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's physician father attended to the birth of Ernest and subsequently blew a horn on his front porch, announcing to the neighbors that his wife had borne a baby boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and War of Secession veteran who lived with the family. Ernie was his namesake.

Ernie's mother was a homemaker with considerable singing talent who 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. His mother had wanted to bear twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Grace Hemingway further feminized her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine."

While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Ernie adopted his father's outdoorsy interests of hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake, and would often spend summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature would instill in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in areas of the world generally considered remote or isolated.

Ernie attended Oak Park and River Forest High School where he excelled both academically and athletically. Ernie boxed and played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was serving as editor for both Trapeze and Tabula, the school's newspaper and literary magazine, respectively.

When the Great War broke out, Ernie was conscripted into the US Army as an ambulance driver. He was wounded when his ambulance, marked with the Red Cross, was strafed by a Canadian aeroplane. He lost much of his genital region.

After the war Ernie moved to Boston. There he fell on hard times, drifting from one writing job to the next and supplementing his income by taking money to be knocked out by prizefighters. He was hired by Sylvia Enos to ghostwrite I Sank Roger Kimball, the story of her revenge against Confederate submariner Roger Kimball, who killed her husband George after his country had already surrendered in the Great War. Sylvia was impressed by Ernie's short, clipped sentences and paragraphs, and also found herself strangely attracted to Ernie himself. It was Ernie who advised Sylvia to close out her account at her bank the day before that bank closed, saving Sylvia from financial ruin.

Sylvia and Ernie began an intimate relationship shortly thereafter. Ernie's genital wound made sex difficult for him, but Sylvia was patient. Nevertheless, his impotence left Hemingway depressed and embittered, and Sylvia became frightened by the intensity of Ernie's dark moods after his frequent sexual failures. At one point Ernie angrily remarked that he should go to Spain and participate in the Spanish Civil War. At other times, he spoke of suicide.

Many of Sylvia's friends and loved ones, including her son George Enos, Jr., encouraged her to leave Ernie before she harmed him. But their warnings only made her more stubborn and more committed to her relationship with Ernie despite her fears. One night Ernie produced a loaded revolver after a failed attempt at sex; Sylvia tried to wrest it away from him, the gun misfired, and Sylvia was killed. Horrified, Ernie shot himself.