Birthplace: Oak Park, Illinois
Typewriter: Corona No. 3 & No.4*, Underwood Noiseless Portable*, various Royal portables*, Halda portable (recently sold in an online auction)
Hemingway started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. Before the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a memb er of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library
The Hemingway Resource Cent er
Picturing Hemingway – A writ er in his time by N ational Portrait Gall ery
Hemingway's home in Key West, Florida
Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum