Ernest Hemingway's Birthday
Next: July 21, 2027
Write one true sentence.
The story
Where it comes from
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, and this Story marks his birthday. He started as a reporter on a Kansas City newspaper at seventeen, drove ambulances in Italy in the First World War, and in the 1920s joined the American writers in Paris, the world of The Sun Also Rises (1926). His plain, spare prose and understated dialogue changed how a generation wrote. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1954 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
How it's celebrated
His birthplace in Oak Park, now a museum run by the Hemingway Foundation, welcomes visitors to the house where he was born. In Key West, Florida, where he lived in the 1930s, a week-long festival around his birthday ends in a famous look-alike contest of bearded 'Papas'. Anywhere else, it is a good day to read one of his short stories, or to write someone a letter in short, honest sentences.
Did you know
- On the day he was born, his father announced the news from the porch of the family home by playing a fanfare on his cornet.
- Too ill to travel to Stockholm, he had his Nobel speech read by the US ambassador; it says that writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
- The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston holds his papers and more than 10,000 photographs of him.
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