of this would eventually lead to his death by a self-inflicted pistol shot in 1928 just as Hemingway was beginning the reap the material rewards of his advancing literary career. Looking back on his own youth, In retrospect, Hemingway considered his childhood to have been an unhappy one, but he viewed such early alienation as an essential artistic and personal resource, as a necessary ingredient for the realization an individual "heroic code" to guide action. Backtracking to Hemingway's adolescence, he attended and graduated from Oak Park High School where he was a decent, but not an outstanding, athlete and student. His first "published" works were articles and poems that appeared in the school's newspaper. These samples of his skills may have helped him to get his first job after graduation as a copywriter for the Kansas City Star. But by this time, the United States had entered World War I. Hemingway tried to enlist in the United States Army but was rejected due to a vision problem. He then found a close alternative by volunteering to serve as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. He was assigned to the Italian Front (Italy switching to the Allied side against Germany and Austria in 1915). Shortly after reaching the front lines (and a few days shy of his nineteenth birthday) Hemingway was wounded in the legs from mortar fire at Fossalta di Pivi on 8 July, 1918. Having seen very little action apart from this assault, Hemingway was eventually transferred to a hospital in Milan. Like Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway met a nurse there, Agnes von Kurowsky, and he proposed marriage. Unlike Frederic's lover, Catherine Barkley, Agnes was not Hemingway's "Juliet." Eight years older than the wounded American, Agnes derailed Hemingway's plans to return with a war bride, jilting him to wed an Italian officer instead. Hemingway recovered from his injuries, the War came to an end, and he returned to his native land alo...