Ernest Hemingway wasn’t just one of the most influential writers of the 20th century,
he was one of the most adventurous.
Hi everyone, ken here, welcome to "ThisHouse" Today we are exploring the homes of Ernest
Hemingway as we travel from the Midwest to Key West.
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In 1899, Ernest Hemingway was born to a conservative family in Oak Park, Illinois.
His Father, Clarence was a doctor in town and his mother, Grace was a musician.
Grace was a strong believer in upholding tradition, which is why in Ernest’s younger years his
mother clothed him in dresses styled with long hair, a remnant of Victorian era tradition.
Every summer, the family would head up to their modest vacation home in Michigan, which
they had named Windemere.
From a young age, Ernest developed a love for the outdoors, spending weeks camping and
fishing.
After graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School, Ernest got his first job as a
reporter for the Kansas City Star, but that did not last long.
The same year, in 1917, World War 1 was raging in Europe.
He felt called to join the military, but was rejected due to his poor eyesight.
Still wanting to help out, he joined up with the Red Cross to become an ambulance driver.
His first deployment took him to the Italian Front where he was to search for any surviving
women in a factory which had been blown up.
He would later go on to write about this traumatic scene, “I remember that after we searched
quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments.”
Chilling words for a young man seeing the carnage of war for the first time.
2 months later, as he was brining cigarettes and sweets to the men on the front line, he
was met with rounds of mortars which left his legs littered with shrapnel.
After some hospitalization, he was sent home to his parents house where he spent the next
year living in a daze, not talking about what he had experienced during war.
After taking some time to cope, he was ready to return to work at the age of 20, taking
a job with the Toronto Star as a freelance writer and as an associate editor for Chicago’s
Cooperative Commonwealth.
By this time, he had moved into an apartment with a roommate, which is how he met his future
wife, Hadley Richardson of St. Louis, Missouri.
She had come to visit Ernest’s roomate’s sister and the two immediately hit it off.
She was older than him, but had a fun-loving and adventurous personality.
After only knowing each other for a couple months, the two got married and moved to Paris,
France where Ernest had accepted a job as a foreign correspondent with the Toronto Star.
Ernest flourished in Paris, he began writing short stories, had his first son, and began
mingling with famous authors such as F Scott Fitzgerald whose most notable work, The Great
Gatsby, had just been published.
This inspired the ambitious, young Ernest to follow his dreams and of writing a full
length novel.
Now that he was working on longer manuscripts, his career began to flourish.
He met Pauline Pfeiffer, an American journalist who encouraged Ernest to sign a publishing
contract with Scribner, the same publisher F Scott Fitzgerald had partnered with.
Scribner published what is widely regarded as Hemingway’s best work, The Sun Also Rises.
This new chapter in his life left him filled with excitement and he began falling in love
with the young journalist who had helped to connect him with a big name publisher.
In no time at all, the two began having an affair.
Hadley caught on to them and asked for a divorce, after which Ernest and Pauline married each
other.
She became his muse.
Filled with creativity, he began writing more than ever before, even taking time to write
on their honeymoon.
The following year, they moved back to the united states to give birth to their first
child together in Kansas City, Missouri.
They visited Key West Florida and fell in love with the way of life on the island.
As a wedding present, Pauline’s wealthy uncle showered them with gifts, sending a
brand new Ford Roadster to the island and purchasing them a Spanish Colonial House which
they would come to call home.
It had been built in 1851 and had fallen into a state of disrepair, but the young couple
saw this as an opportunity to renovate the house and truly make it their own.
It had good bones, with walls composed of 18 inch thick limestone blocks and was situated
at 16 feet above sea level, making it a fortress against even the most hostile tempests.
On the one and a half acre lot, in 1937, Pauline spent 20,000 dollars, or the modern day equivalent
of over 400,000 dollars having the first pool in Key West built on their property.
When Ernest saw the concrete settling, he famously pulled out a penny from his pocket
and pushed it into the drying concrete while saying, “here, take the last penny I’ve
got.”
Walking inside, you would arrive in the stair hall opening towards the back of the house
with large windows to allow for ample circulation.
The dining room was long and narrow with a crystal chandelier which Pauline had installed
to replace the ceiling fans.
On one wall, there was a cast iron fireplace with its summer cover which was most likely
never used.
The house was decorated with trophies in every room from safaris Ernest had gone on while
in Kenya, a strip which inspired several of the novels written in his studio which sat
above the old carriage house on the property.
The couple’s bedroom, on the second floor, opened out to the wrap around veranda with
shutters to provide privacy while allowing for much needed air flow on hot Florida nights.
While living here, Ernest became friends with a ship captain who gifted him a cat by the
name of Snow White.
Snow White was a polydactyl cat, meaning it had more toes than it should.
The cat became very popular with the other cats on the island, leading to many generations
of polydactyl cats being born around the house.
To this day, these cats are referred to as Hemingway Cats because they have continued
to carry the polydactyl gene through generations.
If you are ever on Key West, be sure to count the toes of any cat you encounter, they might
just be descended from Snow White.
As amazing as it might sound to live on an island with your lover, surrounded by mutant
cats, their paradise did not last long.
Ernest started having an affair with Martha Gellhorn.
Naturally, this lead to his relationship with Pauline falling apart.
When they separated, Ernest set sail for Cuba aboard his private yacht, named Pilar.
As soon as Pauline and Ernest were officially divorced, he married Martha and moved to a
stately home in Havana, Cuba which he also decorated with trophies from his hunts.
Here he became even more enamored with cats as he was said to have as many as 12 living
inside the home.
When World War 2 broke out, Ernest headed away to Europe to document the war through
his writings.
He was there for the Normandy Landings where he witnessed the first 5 waves of troops reduced
to what he described as looking like “heavily laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between
the sea and first cover.”
While covering the 22nd Infantry Regiment, Ernest somehow ended up leading a small group
of militants as a resistance group against the occupying German Forces.
He was later tried for interfering as a journalist and allegedly leading a resistance in violation
of the Geneva Convention, but he was able to argue his way out of it saying he merely
offered advice to the towns folk.
In the end, the charges were dropped.
After the war, he returned to Cuba where he experienced writers block.
He left his wife and married his fourth wife, Mary Welsch.
But his good times came to an abrupt end through a series of unfortunate events.
He had survived two world wars from the front lines, but daily life would prove to be more
dangerous for him.
He was first in a car accident which left his knee shattered, so he set off to Venice,
Italy to relax and heal where he started an affair with a young girl named Adriana.
This romance inspired his novel, Across the River and into the Trees, but when it was
received poorly by critics, he furiously wrote one of his most famous works, The Old Man
and the Sea, winning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.
The following year, as a Christmas gift to his wife, Mary.
The two traveled to the Belgian Congo where they chartered a plane to do some sight seeing.
The plane struck a utility pole and crashed, leaving them both with broken bones.
The following day, a plane arrived to transport them to a hospital, but after leaving the
runway the engine backfired causing it to partially explode mid air, leading to the
second plane crash in two days for the couple.
This left them with horrendous burns on top of their broken bones.
After onlookers saw what had happened, reports began to circulate around the world that Ernest
Hemingway was dead.
This brought him some good laughs while he recovered in the hospital and after a few
weeks he cleared things up with a press relief.
He had planned a fishing trip with his son for the next spring, and with his recovery
going so well, he decided not to cancel his plans.
While on the trip, a brush fire broke out causing Hemingway to receive a second round
of second degree burns all around his body.
Within less than a year, his kidney and liver had ruptured, he had cracked his skull, fractured
two disks, and received burns all over his body.
This lead to him developing a drinking habit to help numb the pain.
Later that year, in October of 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but
instead of attending in person, he stayed home, still recovering, and sent a speech
to be read on his behalf.
But he never stopped writing, thanks to a much needed bit of luck, a hotel found a suit
case full of manuscripts that Ernest had lost nearly 20 years earlier.
He was delighted to have his early works back and began finishing them.
But his mind began to slip, he had trouble organizing sentences and writing brief passages.
Life Magazine commissioned him for a 10,000 word manuscript, but ended up receiving a
full length book which was published by Scribner, named The Dangerous Summer.
After this, he became seriously ill, his conditions had all caught up with him and he knew he
was in his final days.
He decided to visit his and Mary’s summer house in Ketchum, Idaho where things to a
turn for the worse.
Mary found him one day holding a shotgun inside and grew concerned, she reached out for help
and after he was institutionalized for a few months, he was returned to their home where
he picked up the same shot gun and proceeded to take his own life.
Mary initially told reporters that the death was an accident, though she later clarified
that it was not.
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Now back to the story.
The literary work of Ernest Hemingway went on to inspire future generations of writers
and journalists and much of his work is considered to be among the best American Works.
In honor of his impact, many of his homes survive today as house museums including the
Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West Florida which continues to be open to the
public for tours.
If you have ever visited, I would love to hear about your experience below in the comments
section.
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