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The Author. Ernest Miller* Hemingway ("Hem" to his friends) has seen much of the war and violence he so aptly describes. Born July 21, 1898, at Oak Park, Ill., second of a family of six, he was only two when his father, a doctor who was also a sports enthusiast, handed him a fishing rod, was not yet in his teens when he graduated to shotgun and rifle. On long hunting trips in northern Michigan he was his father's regular companion. In other respects, he was not so filial. His father had hopes of his becoming a doctor; his mother, artistically inclined herself, wanted him to be a cellist and rigidly enforced hours of supposed practice in which non-musical Hemingway, by "just sitting thinking," now says he gained most impetus for his writing career.
Headstrong always, at 15 he ran away, was returned home to finish high school. On graduation in 1917 he was off again, this time to Kansas City, where as a cub on the Star he nosed the beaten track of hospital, morgue and jail. War was in all minds, however, and a few months later he joined an ambulance unit bound for the Italian front. There he transferred to the Italian infantry; soon after, in a trench-mortar explosion, got a wound that retired him from active service. Of his War experiences, Author Hemingway speaks modestly, says usually, "I spent most of the time in hospitals." He carried this attitude so far that when his War-novel (A Farewell to Arms) was being cinematized he took pains to deny all publicity stories of a more glamorous military career, scotched plans for a "world premiere" at Piggot, Ark. (where he happened to be staying), by fleeing the town before the film's arrival.
As a result of his wound, he still wears an aluminum kneecap, grafted bonebits here and there, as well as a score of body scars. (A deep scar on his forehead is not war-gotten, but the mark of a bathroom skylight that fell on him.) He claims to have learned more about war from his post-War reporting of battles in the Near East than he ever did through his own soldiering. This reporting was done for the Toronto Star in the early '20s. Hemingway was by that time married (to Hadley Richardson, childhood Michigan friend), comfortably established in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. In his spare time he diligently wrote the short stories later to be published as Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923), and in our time (1924). Both were issued by small advance-guardist presses in Paris. Neither created any stir. Since, copies of the Paris edition ot in our time have brought as high as $160 at rare-book sales.
Hemingway's chief mentors of the Pans period were Ezra Pound, erudite, eccentic poet and expatriate, who helped get Hemingway's first books published; Gertrude Stein, who, besides godmothering Hemingway's first child, John Hadley, had a lasting influence both on Hemingway's style and point of view. The friendships were not so lasting. "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it," summed up Hemingway in his early career. "Gertrude was always right." The Stein-Hemingway feud has been one of the most persistent literary squabbles of the generation.