First in a four-part series on the life and works of Ernest Hemingway, compiled from contemporary film with recollections of his friends and relatives and his own words.
A quarter of a century after his death Ernest Hemingway remains one of the giants of American literature. His life, like his books, seemed centred on violence. He was a big-game hunter and an aficionado of the bullfight.Ã He thrilled to the excitement of war and he died by his own hand as his father had done before him.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he had an idyllic childhood around the woods of mid-Western America. In 1918 he joined the American force fighting in Italy, the experiences of which he was later to describe in A Farewell to Arms. It was there that he fell in love for the first time with the nurse who helped him back to recovery from a horrifying, near-fatal, shrapnel wound - only to be rejected by her a few months later.
Feature: page 82
(Ceefax subtitles)
