Hemingway: News and Biography

Author: Dong Hengxun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: At home, young Hemingway loved reading magazines and books, and was good at using his imagination. When he was five years old, his maternal grandfather was recovering from an illness in their home. One day, he and told him he had grabbed a running horse with one hand. His grandfather was delighted and said to his daughter, who was Hemingway's mother, "You wait and see, this child will become famous. If he puts his imagination to good use, he will become famous."
After starting primary school, his favorite subject was writing essays. At the age of eleven, he wrote a purely fictional story titled "My First Sea Voyage," written from the perspective of a ship captain's son about a journey to Australia. His inspiration came from the previous year when his mother took him to Boston, where he had seen the ocean on an island along the Atlantic coast.
The most unforgettable event of Hemingway's youth was an illegal hunting incident. That year, he had just turned sixteen, and he was rowing a boat with his favorite sister, Sunny, in Walloon Lake. They rowed to the western end of the lake when suddenly a heron flew out of the reeds. Hemingway, without hesitation, raised his gun and shot it down. He wrapped the bird in newspaper and placed it on the boat before going ashore with his sister to find something to eat. When they returned, they found the bird missing. It had been taken by the son of the game warden, who asked Hemingway who had shot the bird. Hemingway lied, saying someone had given it to him as a specimen. The boy went and told his father. Hemingway panicked, first fleeing to a friend's house and then hiding at his uncle's farm. When his father found out, he wrote to him, urging him to confess. Hemingway did so and ended up paying a fifteen-dollar fine.
This incident shows that Hemingway's mindset during his youth was normal. He was not a deliberately disruptive child, nor could he be considered a conscious rebel. When he made a mistake, he was afraid but still listened to his parents and admitted his wrongdoing. Later, he wrote a short story based on this event, where the protagonist, a teenage Nick, shoots a deer, and the game warden becomes the villain with "a face the color of tobacco dust."
Hemingway's father was strict with him and gave him very little spending money. He paid him one cent for each year of his age each week. For example, at fifteen, he received fifteen cents per week, and at sixteen, it increased to sixteen cents per week. Hemingway felt it wasn't enough, so he worked during holidays, digging potatoes or delivering vegetables to residents and restaurants along the lake by boat; during school, he delivered newspapers every day. This way, he had enough money to go on outings with his classmates and practice boxing. Boxing became his favorite sport after the age of fourteen. He was tall and had broad shoulders, and with his family's permission, he joined a boxing training class. He was often beaten to a pulp but never gave up, persisting in his training.
Hemingway secretly used his mother's thirty-square-meter music room as a boxing gym and often brought classmates to practice. This sport became a lifelong passion for him. While he was enthusiastically practicing boxing at sixteen, he also began writing novels. That year, the literary magazine of Oak Park High School, "The Board," published two of his stories: one about a bloodshed incident caused by a misunderstanding in the woods, and another about a Swede who injured someone because of his color blindness. Hemingway was even more enthusiastic about writing news reports, and the school's weekly newspaper, "Autumn,"