Happy Birthday, Ernest Hemingway!

July 21, 2010

If Ernest Hemingway were alive today, he would be 111 years old! His birth anniversary is celebrated every year at the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Ill., the city of his birth. More information about this annual event is available at www.ehfop.org.

Hemingway’s first major fictional works, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, are likely the most commonly known. Third on the list might be The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. Subsequently, in 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died shortly thereafter in 1961 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

What may be uncommonly known about Ernest Hemingway is that he began his career in 1917 as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. In his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920’s, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway often refers to his early training in journalism at the Kansas City Star for the development of his writing style. So, why not celebrate this great American novelist by re-reading a favorite or one you always meant to read.