Ernest Miller Hemingway was born at eight o'clock in the morning on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. In the nearly sixty two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century and created a mythological hero in himself that captivated not only serious literary critics but the average man as well.

Born in the family home at 439 North Oak Park Avenue, a house built by his widowed grandfather Ernest Hall, Hemingway was the second of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway's six children; he had four sisters and one brother. He was named after his maternal grandfather Ernest Hall and his great uncle Miller Hall.

Oak Park was a mainly Protestant, upper middle-class suburb of. Only ten miles from the big city, Oak Park was really much farther away philosophically. It was basically a conservative town that tried to isolate itself from Chicago's liberal seediness. Hemingway was raised with the conservative midwestern values

When he wasn't hunting or fishing his mother taught him the finer points of music. Grace was an accomplished singer who once had aspirations of a career on stage, but eventually settled down with her husband and occupied her time by giving voice and music lessons to local children, including her own. Hemingway never had a knack for music and suffered through choir practices and cello lessons, however the musical knowledge he acquired from his mother helped him share in his first wife Hadley's interest in the piano.

Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then traveled to Milan in early June after receiving his orders. The day he arrived, a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue; it was an immediate and powerful initiation into the horrors of war. Two days later he was sent to an ambulance unit in the town of Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918, only a few weeks after arriving, fragments from an Austrian mortar shell, which had landed just a few feet away, seriously wounded Hemingway. At the time, Hemingway was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in the trenches near the front lines. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious, killed an Italian soldier and blew the legs off another. What happened next has been debated for some time. In a letter to Hemingway's father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest's fellow ambulance drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of shrapnel be!

Then he sails back triumphantly to land with the fish lashed to the side of the boat. It is bigger and more beautiful than any fish he has ever seen before. Then come the sharks. He defends the fish, but they take it, piece by piece. They come, bite, go. They "come like pigs to the trough"-and the ones he kills with knife, harpoon and club all sink to the bottom of the ocean with pieces of his precious fish. He has so much respect for the fish he even want to take the sword from the fish's head so that they could battle the sharks together. When he sails into Cuba's harbor at night, nothing but the skeleton remains of the fish. I feel that the sharks fill the role of women in the book. Like in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Mrs. Macomber kills her husband at his finest moment. The sharks swoop in and destroy the fish, killing the finest moment of the old man's life.

ess of writing. I've never forgotten them."

In Hemingway's novels there are some absolute givens. Most women are portrayed as objects and nuisances, alcohol, and Hemingway's sympathy is partly, and sometimes completely, on the side of the game or the bull; he identifies sometimes with the man, sometimes with the beast, but most often with both. When I finish a Hemingway novel I usually am left with a feeling that Hemingway wishes life was as elegant as the hunt. As beautifully simple as the hunter vs. the hunted. He respected and admired the animals so much that he had to kill them. This gives the beast an ambiguity that sometimes makes it hard to distinguish the man from the beast.

Upon returning from war Hemingway was finally able to concentrate his efforts into writing. In Green Hills of Africa he asks himself why he has always hunted and killed so much. What is the meaning behind his love of the hunt? By killing so many animals it is almost like he is filling a void in himself, sort of like saying, if I hadn't killed so many animals I might have killed myself. Also in the Green Hills of Africa he approaches the matter of hunting and killing from another side. After breaking his arm, with inflammation and gangrene, he was hospitalized for five weeks. At night

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Approximate Word count = 2474
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)