page_title: Ernest Hemingway
section_title: World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Ernest Hemingway / Life / World War I
caption_attribution_description: Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918
context_page_description: Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
  Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms.
  In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives.
context_section_description: In December 1917 Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy, after having failed to enlist in the U.S. Army because of poor eyesight. In May 1918 he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. That June he arrived at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers retrieving the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments." A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.
  On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery. He was still only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you." He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.
  He spent six months at the hospital, where he met and formed a strong friendship with "Chink" Dorman-Smith that lasted for decades and shared a room with future American foreign service officer, ambassador, and author Henry Serrano Villard.
  While recuperating he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior.  When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry.  Instead he received a letter in March with her announcement that she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.
caption: Hemingway in uniform in Milan, 1918. He drove ambulances for two months until he was wounded.
exif: {}