Hemingway's Life in his Stories
             Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL on July 21, 1899, the son of a physician. It was from his father that he inherited his love for outdoor activities -- sports, camping, hunting, fishing, and boating. The young Ernest played football and boxed in high school. Given Hemingway's overwhelming love for physical action, it is remarkable that he became a writer at all. And yet he became one of the great names in American literature, primarily due to his uncanny gift for probing the universality of his own despair, and his development of a uniquely American resolution.
             After graduating from high school in 1916, Hemingway immediately left for Kansas City to enlist in the Army, hoping to be sent overseas to fight in World War I. Unfortunately, minor eye damage incurred during his high school sports career was severe enough for the Army to turn him down. He got a job at the Kansas City Star as a reporter until he was able to convince a Red Cross ambulance unit to take him on as a driver, and at last he made it to the front in Europe. He was seriously wounded in Italy, and incurred nearly a dozen operations to restore complete function to his knee, which was now surmounted with an aluminum kneecap. Decorated for bravery (recklessness is probably more like it), he returned to the front and finished out the war.
             Psychologically, it is clear that Hemingway never got over his war experiences, which seems to have been a common problem with writers of his generation. John K. Roth quotes Gertrude Stein as calling Hemingway's set "the lost generation" (Roth, 450). Although only a few of his stories and novels actually dealt with battle or military life, the war clearly severed the connection with his boyhood, just as it destroyed the enormous sense of complacency which was the nineteenth century's legacy to the twentieth. After the war, nothing would ever seem quite so stable a...