Ernest Hemingway Timeline

1899 Jul 21 Ernest Hemingway Is Born
Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World ...
1918 May Ernest Hemingway Joins The Red Cross
Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then traveled to Milan in early June after receiving his orders. The day he arrived, a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry m...
1921 Sep 3 Ernest Hemingway Marries Hadley Richardson
She was raised in St. Louis, Missouri and married Ernest Hemingway on September 3, 1921. Together they moved to Paris, France, and in the fall of 1923, as Hadley approached the term of he...
1922 Feb Ernest Hemingway is Introduced to Gertrude Stein
In the 1920s, her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, with walls covered by avant-garde paintings, attracted many of the great writers of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornto...
1922 Feb Ernest Hemingway Meets Ezra Pound
At the end of 1921, Ezra Pound rented a ground-floor apartment at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs (southwest of the Luxembourg Gardens). Hemingway visited Ezra here often, and commented ...
1922 Mar Ernest Hemingway Meets James Joyce
Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce, not always a limpid writer. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote: "Joyce has written a...
1925 'In Our Time' Is Published
In Our Time is a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. Each chapter consists of a vignette that in some way relates to the following short story. It was published in 1925, and ...
1925 Apr Ernest Hemingway Meets F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, he describes the first time he met F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre where, as Hemingway describes it, “…a very strange thi...
1926 May 28 'The Torrents of Spring' Is Published
Set in northern Michigan in the mid-1920s The Torrents of Spring is about two World War I veterans, Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill, both of whom work at a pump factory. O'Neill's...
1926 Oct 22 'The Sun Also Rises' Is Published
The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation for future generations. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway melds Paris to Spain; vividly depicts the running of the bulls in...
1927 Jan Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway Are Divorced
Hemingway's marriage to Hadley broke down as he was writing and revising The Sun Also Rises. In the spring of 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, although she h...
1927 May 10 Ernest Hemingway Marries Pauline Pfeiffer
Pauline Marie Pfeiffer (July 22, 1895 – October 21, 1951) was the second wife of the writer Ernest Hemingway. She was born in Parkersburg, Iowa on July 22, 1895, moving to St. Louis in 19...
1927 Oct 14 'Men Without Women' Is Published
Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women. The story takes place at a train station in the Ebro ...
1928 Apr 7 Ernest Hemingway Moves To Key West
The new Hemingways heard of Key West from Ernest’s friend John Dos Passos, and the two stopped at the tiny Florida island on their way back from Paris. They soon discovered that life in r...
1928 Dec 6 Ernest Hemingway's Father Clarence Commits Suicide
Suffering from severe diabetes and concerned about his financial future, Clarence Hemingway shot himself on December 6, 1928 with his father's Smith and Wesson .32 revolver. In The Sound ...
1929 Sep 27 'A Farewell To Arms' Is Published
Pauline was pregnant at the time and on June 28, 1928 gave birth to Patrick by cesarean section. It was in December of that year that Hemingway received the cable reporting his father’s s...
1932 Sep 23 'Death In The Afternoon' Is Published
Death in the Afternoon (1932) marked a departure from the fiction-writing career of Ernest Hemingway. A study of the Spanish bullfight, the book grew out of the author's keen interest in ...
1932 Dec 8 The Film Version of 'A Farewell to Arms' Is Released
Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes play Frederic and Catherine, a soldier and nurse who fall for each other in wartime, and they are matched perfectly. They bring Borzage's liking for towering, ...
1933 Ernest Hemingway Travels to Africa
In 1933 Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa, a 10-week trip that provided material for Green Hills of Africa as well as the short stories "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "T...
1933 Oct 27 'Winner Take Nothing' Is Published
Returning to fiction in 1933, Hemingway published Winner Take Nothing, a volume of short stories. The book contained 14 stories, including "A Clean Well Lighted Place," "Fathers and Sons,...
1935 Oct 25 'Green Hills of Africa' Is Published
Green Hills of Africa initially got a cool reception. Writing for The New York Times, critic John Chamberlain claimed: "Green Hills of Africa" is not one of the major Hemingway works. Mr....
1937 Feb 27 Ernest Hemingway Reports On The Spanish Civil War
In March 1937 Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. The civil war caused a marital war in the Hemingway household as well. ...
1937 Oct 15 'To Have and Have Not' Is Published
The novel consists of two earlier short stories ("One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return") that make up the opening chapters and a novella (that makes up two-thirds of the book) wri...
1938 Oct 14 'The Fifth Column and the First 49 Stories' is Published
And so "The Fifth Column" is autobiographical drama. Philip Rawlings, its leading man and a Loyalist agent, justified his apparently dissolute existence as a "third-rate newspaperman" on ...
1940 Oct 21 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is Published
This novel is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of Robert Jordan, a character inspired by Hemingway's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Robert Jordan is an Ameri...
1940 Nov 4 Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer are Divorced
Pfeiffer married Hemingway on May 10, 1927 but the match was difficult. She was wealthy and he was a best-selling author (The Sun Also Rises) with three books in print. Although they had ...
1940 Nov 21 Ernest Hemingway Marries Martha Gellhorn
Often travelling with Gellhorn, the two fell in love as they competed for quality stories. They would eventually marry in November of 1940, nearly four years after meeting at Sloppy Joe’s...
1943 Jul 14 "For Whom The Bell Tolls" Film Is Released
For Whom the Bell Tolls is a 1943 film in Technicolor based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. It stars Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. This was Ingrid Bergm...
1944 Jun
to 1944 Dec
Ernest Hemingway Reports on World War II
In late August of 1944 Hemingway and his band of irregular soldiers entered Paris. Hemingway was always fond of saying he was the first to enter Paris en route to its liberation, but the ...
1944 Oct 11 'To Have and Have Not' Premieres In New York
Although Howard Hawks had a high regard for Hemingway's works in general, he considered To Have and Have Not his worst book, a "bunch of junk," and told Hemingway so; Hawks and Hemingway ...
1945 Mar Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn are Divorced
In the spring of 1944 Hemingway finally decided to go to Europe to report the war, heading first to London where he wrote articles about the RAF and about the war’s effects on England. Wh...
1946 Mar 14 Ernest Hemingway Marries Mary Welsh
According to A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway supposedly considered divorcing fourth wife Mary Welsh. Hotchner reports in a new preface to Papa Hemingway, that Hemingway once told him: I wish I ...
1950 Sep 7 'Across the River and Into the Trees' is Published
Across the River and Into the Woods has a frame story of 50-year-old Colonel Cantwell duckhunting in Trieste. The first chapter is set in the present, then using the technique of stream o...
1952 Sep 8 'Old Man and the Sea' Is Published
In September of 1952 The Old Man and the Sea appeared in Life magazine, selling over 5 million copies in a flash. The next week Scribners rolled out the first hardcover edition of 50,000 ...
1953 May 4 Ernest Hemingway Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Literature
Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done....
1954 Jan Ernest Hemingway's Plane Crashes
In Africa he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes: he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg; had a concussion; temporarily lost vision in his left eye and the he...
1954 Oct 29 Ernest Hemingway Is Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
Stockholm, Sweden, Oct. 28--The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded today to Ernest Hemingway. The Swedish Academy, which presents this laurel, said of the 55- year-old American author...
1960 Jul Ernest Hemingway Moves to Ketchum, Idaho
When he left Spain, Hemingway travelled straight to Idaho; but was worried about money and his safety. His paranoia became acute and he believed the FBI was actively monitoring his moveme...
1960 Sep 5 Life Magazine Publishes 'The Dangerous Summer'
The book charts the rise of Antonio Ordóñez (the son of Cayetano Ordóñez, whose exploits in the bull ring and fighting technique Hemingway had written about in The Sun Also Rises) across ...
1960 Nov Ernest Hemingway Is Admitted to the Mayo Clinic
But even the beautiful landscapes of Idaho couldn’t hide the fact that something was seriously wrong with Hemingway. In the fall of 1960 Hemingway flew to Rochester, Minnesota and was adm...
1961 Jul 2 Ernest Hemingway Commits Suicide
Three months later, at home in Ketchum, Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun". When his personal physician Dr. Saviers arrived, he was sedated and admitted to the Sun Valley hospital; ...
1964 Dec 'A Moveable Feast' Is Published
Three years later the manuscript was published as "A Moveable Feast." The title apparently was chosen by Hemingway's widow, Mary, who recalled words he had written to a friend in 1950: "I...
1970 Oct 6 'Islands In the Stream' Is Published
The first act, "Bimini", begins with an introduction to the character of Thomas Hudson, a classic Hemingway stoic male figure. Hudson is a renowned American painter who finds tranquility ...