Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Nicknamed "Papa," he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris known as "the Lost Generation," as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast. He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. For a serious writer, he achieved a rare cult-like popularity during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic males who must show "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics in the American literature canon.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero, Illinois, 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") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's physician father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had borne 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"), 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.

Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to poor vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.

Soon after arriving on the Italian Front Hemingway witnessed the brutalities of war. On his first day on duty, an ammunition factory near Milan blew up. Hemingway had to pick up the human, primarily female, remains. This first encounter with death left him shaken.

The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror. One of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, entertained Hemingway with a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."(Hemingway, for his part, would quote this line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his famous short stories set in Africa.) To another soldier, Hemingway once said, "You are troppo vecchio [It. too old] for this war, pop." The 50-year old soldier replied, "I can die as well as any man."

On 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver. He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries. Hemingway survived by plugging his wounds with cigarette butts, thereby staunching the blood flow.

Hemingway worked in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. With very little in the way of entertainment, he often drank heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. Here he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each. She was more than six years older than he. Hemingway fell in love with her, but their relationship did not survive his return to the United States; instead of following Hemingway to America, as originally planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer. This left an indelible mark on his psyche, and provided inspiration for, and was fictionalized in, one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms. Later in life, Hemingway identified even more closely with the protagonist of that novel, claiming (falsely) to have attained the rank of lieutenant in the Italian army and to have fought in three battles.

After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United States in part due to prohibition, in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as the Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario.During his stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris.

For a short time from 1920 to 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago working for a small newspaper. In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "the Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad.

At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning of the American expatriate circle that became known as the "Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir, A Moveable Feast. His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. His own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He asked Gertrude Stein to be John's godmother. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.

Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story cycle In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.

In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They frequently exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, however, disliked Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque" and asserting that his macho persona was a facade, she became irrationally convinced that Hemingway was homosexual and accused her husband of having an affair with him.

Some sources have speculated that Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on openly gay individuals, such as Jean Cocteau, was overcompensation for latent homosexuality. In one such instance, an anecdote told by Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil", a salacious, phallic allusion.The proposed argument is that the rage against Cocteau and Radiguet (whose relationship has been heavily contested in other sources) shows an inherent hostility against homosexuals which also becomes a central theme of much of his short fiction, including "The Sea Change".

These relationships and long nights of excessive drinking provided inspiration for Hemingway's first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which took him only six weeks to finish at his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas. The novel was semi-autobiographical, following a group of expatriate Americans as they ambled around Europe. The novel was a success and met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write it after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.

Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue.[19] Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing "The Killers", one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories. In 1928, Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to Key West, Florida, to begin their new life together. However, their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic event in Hemingway's life.

In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This greatly hurt Hemingway. He immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and stirred up controversy by vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to Hell. At about the same time, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and a friend of Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also committed suicide. In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the couple a few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after difficult labor, details of which were incorporated into the concluding scene of A Farewell to Arms.

Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms details the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical: the plot is directly inspired by his relationship with Sister von Kurowsky in Milan; the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is obscure, curiously, he had already appeared in In Our Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. The success of A Farewell to Arms made Hemingway financially independent.

Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behavior from him, even in these formative years of his career. For example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. According to Fitzgerald, McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book, labeled Hemingway "a fag and a wife-beater" and claimed that Pauline, his second wife, was a lesbian (she was alleged to have had lesbian affairs after their divorce). Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's.

Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (this led to a physical confrontation between the two in the offices of Scribners that Maxwell Perkins witnessed and later described in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another facet of Eastman's criticism consisted of the suggestion that Hemingway give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened social awareness.

Of criticism, Hemingway said, "You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love", in an interview in The Paris Review, with its founder, George Plimpton, in 1958.

Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida, where he established his first American home. From his old stone house—a wedding present from Pauline's uncle—Hemingway fished in the waters around the Dry Tortugas with his longtime friend Waldo Peirce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and occasionally traveled to Spain, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.

Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become an aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain, he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he).

A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya, moving on to Tanzania, where he hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara and west and southeast of the present-day Tarangire National Park. 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of his African experiences.

In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. While there, Hemingway broke his friendship with John Dos Passos because, despite warnings, Dos Passos continued to report on the atrocities of not only the fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also of the elected, left-leaning Republicans whom he favored.In this circumstance, Hemingway has been linked to reporter Herbert Matthews. Hemingway also began to question his Catholicism at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The war also strained Hemingway's marriage. Pauline Pfieffer was a devout Catholic and, as such, sided with the fascist, pro-Catholic regime of Franco, whereas Hemingway supported the Republican government. During this time, Hemingway wrote a little known essay, The Denunciation, which would not be published until 1969 within a collection of stories, the Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical, suggesting that Hemingway might have been an informant for the Republic as well as a weapons instructor during the war.

Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's life: an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids, kidney trouble from fishing, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.

In 1938—along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth Column—49 stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his foreword, to write more. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Some of the collection's important stories include Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories, among them The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the Republicans, ending the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. Hemingway lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce, Hemingway married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940. It was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West, and was finished in July, 1940. The long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish soldiers on the Republican side. It was largely based upon Hemingway's experience of living in Spain and reporting on the war. It is one of his most notable literary accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate paragraph of John Donne's Meditation XVII.

The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare.

Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United States (Martha Gellhorn always viewed the sub-hunting as an excuse for Hemingway and his friends to get gas and booze for fishing). As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage—J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Hemingway from the start, and would become more so later—Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine.

Hemingway, who was a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, observed the D-Day landings from an LCVP (landing craft), although he was not allowed to go ashore. He later became angry that his wife, Martha Gellhorn—by then, more a rival war correspondent than a wife—had managed to get ashore in the early hours of June 7 dressed as a nurse, after she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with explosives. Still later, at Villedieu-les-Poêles, he allegedly threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding. Hemingway acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards formed his own partisan group which, in his telling, took part in the liberation of Paris. This claim has been challenged by many historians, who say the only thing Hemingway liberated was the Ritz Hotel Bar. Nevertheless, he was unquestionably on the scene.

After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to comprise "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea). He spent time in a small Italian town called Acciaroli (located approximately 136 km south of Naples), where he was often seen walking around, bottle in hand. There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (Hemingway) (1970).

Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four contentious years, Hemingway married war correspondent Mary Welsh Hemingway, whom he had met overseas in 1944. Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in post-World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of American Civil War Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich) at the time, Hemingway wrote Across the River and Into the Trees as a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell (based on his friend, then Colonel Charles Lanham) and the young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" means "reborn" in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude, and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was the truest, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old. But 'Across the River' has its latter-day defenders nonetheless.

One section of the sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Upon receiving the latter, he noted with uncharacteristic humbleness that he would have been "happy;happier...if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen", referring to Danish writer Karen Blixen. These awards helped to restore his international reputation.

Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari, he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye and the hearing in his left ear, suffered paralysis of the sphincter, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg. Some American newspapers mistakenly published his obituary, thinking he had been killed.

As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident, which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.

A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by the drinking, was worsening.

Following the revolution in Cuba and the ousting of General Fulgencio Batista in 1959, expropriations of foreign owned property led many Americans to return to the United States. Hemingway chose to stay a little longer. It is commonly said that he shared good relations with Fidel Castro and declared his support for the revolution, and he is quoted as wishing Castro "all luck" with running the country. However, the Hemingway account "The Shot" is used by Cabrera Infante and others as evidence of conflict between Hemingway and Fidel Castro dating back to 1948 and the killing of "Manolo" Castro a friend of Hemingway. Hemingway came under surveillance by the FBI both during WWII and afterwards (most probably because of his long association with marxist Spanish Civil War veterans who were again active in Cuba)] for his residence and activities in Cuba. In 1960, he left the island and Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, Cuba, that he owned for over twenty years. The official Cuban government account is that it was left to the Cuban government, which has made it into a museum devoted to the author. In 2001, Cuba's state-owned tourism conglomerate, El Gran-Caribe SA, began licensing the La Bodeguita del Medio international restaurant chain relying largely on the original Havana restaurant's association with Hemingway, a frequent visitor.

On 26 February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend, Life Magazine bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Lang to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout, before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, the proposal was agreed upon. The first part of the story appeared in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960, with the remaining installments being printed in successive issues.

Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems—and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at 170 pounds (77 kg).

[edit] Suicide

Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again. Some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Judged not mentally responsible for his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; medical and scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view.

Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum.[citation needed] Hemingway's physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Some think Hemingway suffered from bipolar disorder. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.

Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho, at the north end of town. A memorial was erected in 1966.

Hemingway was a prolific letter writer and, in 1981, many of these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961. It was met with some controversy as Hemingway himself stated he never wished to publish his letters. Further letters were published in a book of his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing that Counts[1996].

A long-term project is now underway to publish the thousands of letters Hemingway wrote during his lifetime. The project is being undertaken as a joint venture by Penn State University and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Sandra Spanier, Professor of English and wife of Penn State president Graham Spanier, is serving as general editor of the collection.

Hemingway was still writing up to his death. All of the unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories (portions of which were previously unpublished), The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden.[35] In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream", Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for publication from Ernest's original manuscript." She also stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing to it." Some controversy has surrounded the publication of these works, insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine whether these works should be made available to the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless omits two-thirds of the original manuscript.

The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories was published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987. As well, in 1969 The Fifth Column and Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War was published. It contains Hemingway's only full length play, The Fifth Column, which was previously published along with the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938, along with four unpublished works written about Hemingway's experiences during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway. Six years later, Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and considerably longer version of True at First Light appeared. In either edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African safari in 1953–1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes.Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical, macho image), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it through to publication; the novel was published on September 15 2005.

Also published posthumously were several collections of his work as a journalist. These contain his columns and articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. Finally, a collection of introductions, forwards, public letters and other miscellanea was published as Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame in 2005.

The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in his early novel, The Rum Diary. Thompson's later suicide by gunshot to the head mirrored Hemingway's, although he used a .45 and not a shotgun. Hemingway also provided a role model to fellow author and hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as "the poor man's Ernest Hemingway". In Latin American literature, Hemingway's impact can be seen in the work of fellow Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."