Jaime’s Reviews > Who Was Ernest Hemingway? > Status Update

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“You invent fiction,” he once said, “but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned.”

His homes in Oak Park, Florida, and Cuba have been turned into museums.

“If I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible,” he said late in his life. ….. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest died by suicide in Ketchum.

The Old Man and the Sea won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953. The next year, Ernest was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1935, he went deep-sea fishing to Bimini, the Bahamas. But along the way, Ernest accidentally shot himself in both legs while trying to get a shark he had hooked onto the boat.

Ernest returned to Oak Park. He had been one of the first Americans injured in Italy in the war. He also had been given a medal for bravery with the Red Cross, and the people of his hometown greeted him as a hero. Ernest loved the attention.

Like many young men his age, Ernest was eager to join the war effort. But when he went to sign up for the Army, he was turned down. His eyesight was bad.
Still, Ernest wanted to do his part for his country. In 1918, he joined the American Red Cross, which helped bring supplies and medical services to soldiers. Ernest volunteered to drive ambulances in Italy for the Red Cross.

Grace had been hoping for another daughter. She wanted to have two little girls whom she could dress alike. And even though Ernest turned out to be a boy, that didn’t stop Grace. She dressed Ernest like a girl……
Grace sometimes still had Ernest wear girls’ clothes up until he was almost six years old.

Ernest was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from the city of Chicago.