Big Two-Hearted River

Ernest Hemingway was one of the 20th century’s most prominent authors, famous not only for his fiction but for his adventurous life as a world traveler, hunter, fisherman, and reporter covering five wars. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. Hemingway was the second child of six, with one brother, Leicester, and four sisters: Marcelline, Carol, Madelaine, and Ursula.

While his mother urged him to play the cello, it was his father’s love of the outdoors that captured Hemingway’s heart. Each summer, his father would take the family to Windemere, a summer cabin that he built on Walloon Lake on the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where they had many fishing, hunting, and camping adventures. Though Hemingway played football in high school, he turned to boxing, a sport he practiced throughout his life, with more passion than skill. As Stephen Gertz asserts, Hemingway “had delusions of competence” (Gertz, Stephen J. “Ernest Hemingway: Down for the Count.” Fine Books & Collections, Sept. 2009).

After high school, Hemingway became a reporter for the Kansas City Star where he was instructed to avoid clichés and use short sentences, short first paragraphs, and vigorous English, a

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