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U.S. Census Bureau History: Ernest Hemingway
Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. His books
including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea continue to
inspire aspiring authors more than 6 decades after his death on July 2, 1961.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. His adventurous lifestyle and gregarious personality led him to countries and conflicts around the world. The newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, and novels Hemingway wrote were deeply influenced by the people and cultures he met. More than 6 decades have passed since Hemingway's death, but the stories he told remain some of the most important works of 20th century literature.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL, on July 21, 1899. In high school, the aspiring journalist wrote for the school yearbook and newspaper using the pen name "Ring Lardner Jr." in homage to one of his idols—Chicago Tribune sports writer Ring Lardner. Following high school, he moved to Kansas City, MO, where he worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. Hemingway attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army following the United States' entry into World War I, but was rejected due to his poor eyesight. Soon after, he volunteered to become a Red Cross ambulance driver. He sailed for Europe in May 1918 and arrived in Italy the following month. While handing out chocolate to Italian soldiers on July 8, 1918, a mortar explosion peppered Hemingway with 227 pieces of shrapnel. Despite his injuries, he braved machine gun and artillery fire to carry a more grievously wounded soldier to safety—an act for which he became one of the first Americans to be awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor. Hemingway spent the remaining months of the war convalescing in an Red Cross hospital in Milan, Italy. The war and his hospital stay inspired his 1929 best-selling novel A Farewell to Arms about a World War I ambulance driver and the 1932 short story A Natural History of the Dead about his experience recovering dead women from a bombed Italian munitions factory.
Having recovered from his wounds, Hemingway returned to the United States in early 1919. He accepted a job as a correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper later that year. He married his first wife Hadley Richardson in 1921 and welcomed a son in 1923. Hemingway became the Toronto Star's foreign correspondent in late 1922. From his base in Paris, France, he reported on a wide variety of topics including the Greco-Turkish War, fishing, bullfighting, drinking, and the Parisian nightlife. Encouraged by his friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, Hemingway wrote his first novel—The Sun Also Rises—about a group of British and American friends living in Europe who travel to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, to watch the running of the bulls and bullfights. Soon after the novel's publication, he and Hadley divorced in January 1927.
Hemingway returned to the United States with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer for the birth of their son in 1928 and daughter in 1931. The family split their time between Key West, FL, homes near Sheridan, WY, and international travels that inspired the book Green Hills of Africa and short stories like The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain to work as a correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War. While covering the war, he and John Dos Passos lent their talents to screenwriting the anti-fascist film The Spanish Earth directed by Joris Ivens and narrated by Orson Welles. He later wrote his only play, The Fifth Column during the November 1936–March 1939 Siege of Madrid, Spain.
With his second marriage failing, Hemingway sailed to Havana, Cuba, in 1939. After divorcing Pauline, he married his third wife Martha Gellhorn in 1940. The couple lived at his 15-acre Finca Vigia farm in the San Francisco de Paula ward of Havana, Cuba, during the winter and summered at a home in Ketchum, ID. During this time, he wrote and published what is regarded as one of his best works—the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about a soldier in the Spanish Civil War who is ordered to blow up a bridge.
Hemingway and Martha both worked as correspondents for American newspapers and magazines during World War II. Hemingway accompanied troops aboard landing craft headed to Omaha Beach during the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion, but he was not allowed ashore due to his notoriety. Posing as a nurse, Martha also accompanied troops crossing the English Channel and was the only woman to land in Normandy on June 6. Later in the war Hemingway followed American troops into Paris, France, during its liberation on August 25, 1944. During a June 1947 ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, the author was awarded the Bronze Star for having circulated: "freely under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions. Through his talent of expression, Mr. Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat."
While covering World War II, Hemingway and Martha divorced and he met journalist and author Mary Welsh, who he married in 1946. The couple divided their time between Idaho and the Finca Vigia farm in Cuba where he wrote his Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novella The Old Man and the Sea about a Cuban fisherman. The 1952 novella would be the last major work Hemingway published during his lifetime as illness, an accumulation of injuries suffered during his life of adventure and travel, and two plane crashes in 1954 took their toll on his physical and mental health. Despite attempts to treat debilitating depression and a growing list of physical ailments, Hemingway ended his life at his Ketchum, ID, home on July 2, 1961.
Despite the passage of more than 6 decades since Ernest Hemingway's death, the author remains an icon of American literature, inspiring authors, screenwriters, and journalists. His homes in Oak Park, IL, Key West, FL, Ketchum, ID, and Havana, Cuba, have been preserved as museums dedicated to the author's life and work. He lends his name to prestigious writing awards; a fountain pen; clothing, eyeglasses, hats, shoes, and boots; furniture lines; restaurants, bars, and alcoholic beverages; and even a crater on the planet Mercury. His books—staples in high school and college literature classes—have been adapted for dozens of movies featuring some of Hollywood's greatest stars, including Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn (The Sun Also Rises, 1957), Rock Hudson (A Farewell to Arms, 1957), Spencer Tracy (The Old Man and the Sea, 1958), Audie Murphy (The Gun Runners, 1958), and Anthony Quinn (The Old Man and the Sea, 1990). More recently, Americans were reintroduced to the author in the three-episode documentary Hemingway by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 2021.
You can learn more about the life and work of Ernest Hemingway and the publishing industry using census data and records. For example:
- Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL, on July 21, 1899. Incorporated in 1902, this suburb of Chicago, IL, had a population of 19,444 in 1910. Today, Oak Park, IL, is home to 54,583 people.
- Ernest Hemingway published his first novel—The Sun Also Rises—in 1926. Telling the story of a group of American and British friends who travel from Paris, France, to Pamplona, Spain, to watch the famed "Running of the Bulls" and bullfights. The novel was one of the 9,925 books published in 1926. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War was among 11,328 books published in 1940. Twelve years later, Hemingway published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 about a Cuban fisherman. That year, authors published 11,840 books, including 1,354 works of fiction, 650 biographies, and 1,094 children's books. More recently, Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos
noted that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (which collects data on the total number of books published annually) reported more than 2 million books were published worldwide in 2019, including at least 1,670 new Kindle titles every day! - Before he was an award-winning author, Ernest Hemingway was a journalist for his Oak Park, IL, high school newspaper, the Kansas City Star, and the Canadian Toronto Star. In 1922, the Toronto Star sent Hemingway to Paris, France, where he was the newspaper's first European correspondent. The Census Bureau began collecting data on newspaper publishers as part of the census of manufactures in 1850. In 1850, the United States was home to 254 daily newspaper. In 1904, there were 16,459 daily, Sunday, weekly, and other newspapers in publication. Shortly after Hemingway published his first novel—The Sun Also Rises—the 1927 Census of Manufactures reported 9,693 newspapers and 4,659 periodicals were published in the United States. When Hemingway died in 1961, American readers could choose from 12,285 newspapers and 9,275 periodicals, including Scribner's, Esquire, and Atlantic Monthly magazines which frequently published literary works by Hemingway and other notable authors. In 2017, the economic census collected data from 4,201 newspaper publishing firms. These firms employed 173,635 employees at 7,230 establishments, and recorded revenue of more than $26 billion.
- Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea in 1953. Named for newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded since 1917 to notable authors, playwrights, musicians, journalists, and photographers, including: Robert Frost who is the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes; authors William Faulkner and John Updike; writer and poet Navarre Scott Momaday, who was the first American Indian to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1969; and playwright Thomas "Tennessee" Williams. More contemporary Pulitzer Prize winners include jazz musician Wynton Marsalis; Chinese-American composers Du Yun and Zhou Long; singer, playwright, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda; and Rap and Hip Hop musician and songwriter Kendrick Lamar.
- In June 1947, Ernest Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star Medal during a ceremony at the U.S. embassy in Cuba for his service as a war correspondent during World War II. Awarding of the Bronze Star was authorized by an Executive Order on February 4, 1944, and is awarded to members of the military for either meritorious service or for combat actions. The Bronze Star was awarded to 395,380 people for their service in World War II. Along with Hemingway, other recipients include Audie Murphy, who was the most decorated combat soldier of the war; actor Henry Fonda; U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye; hall of fame baseball player and manager Gil Hodges; General Douglas MacArthur; band leader and musician Glenn Miller; General George S. Patton; Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling; and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.
- Ernest Hemingway's writing was influenced by his first-hand experiences during World War I (1914–1918), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), World War II (1939–1945), the Greco-Turkish War, and the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) and his interactions with veterans of those conflicts. In 2020, the American Community Survey (ACS) reported that
- Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba, at his beloved Finca Vigia home in the San Francisco de Paula Ward of Havana, from 1939 to 1960, and only stopped visiting because the Cuban government seized his farm following the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. While Hemingway stayed on the island during the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), many Cubans fled the country for the United States. These immigrants had the opportunity to identify themselves as "Cuban" on census forms in 1970. Prior to 1970, people of Spanish or Hispanic origin were recorded as “White” on the race question with the exception of the 1930 Census. (In 1930, the Census Bureau instructed enumerators to count people as "Mexican" or "Mex" in response to the race question if their parents were born in Mexico.) The 1970 Census was the first to include a question asking households about their origin or descent. In that year, the Census Bureau asked additional questions of approximately 20 percent of all households, including a question asking if household members were of Spanish origin. Nearly 9.1 million people identified as being of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or an "Other Spanish" ancestry. In 1980, when the census asked all households the Hispanic origin question, 14.6 million identified as being of Spanish or Hispanic origin. The number grew to 22.4 million in 1990; 35.3 million in 2000; and 50.5 million in 2010. In 2020, the American Community Survey found that the United States was home to 59,361,020 Hispanics or Latinos, including 2,332,584 people who identified as Cuban.
- Data from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns series showed that in 2020 there were 2,357 book publishers (NAICS 511130) in the United States. These establishments employed 68,177 employees during the pay period that included March 12. The majority of these publishers—1,418 establishments—were small businesses employing less than 5 people.
- Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary purchased their home in Ketchum, ID, in 1959. The following year, the 1960 Census reported that there were 746 residents living in the city situated in central Idaho's Blaine County. Today, in addition to being home to the author's final resting place, a Hemingway House museum, and other Hemingway-related attractions, the city of Ketchum, ID, has a population of 3,555.
- Despondent that his physical and mental health were making it difficult for him to concentrate, organize his notes, and continue writing, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his Ketchum, ID, home on July 2, 1961. According to the Centers for Disease Control, suicide remains a leading cause of death in the United States, with approximately 1.2 million attempting to take their lives in 2020. If you or a loved one is considering suicide, contact the confidential support of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Beginning on July 16, 2022, dialing 988 anywhere in the United States will allow people to call, text, or chat with a trained counselor who is part of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network.
Ernest Hemingway's first novel—The Sun Also Rises—was one of 9,925 books published in 1926. His 1940 book For Whom the Bell Tolls about an American volunteer in the Spanish
Civil War joined 11,328 books published that year. More recently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (which collects data on the total number of books
published annually) reported that libraries could choose from more than 2 million books published in 2019!
Photo courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
This Month in Census History
On July 23, 1919, Emily Farnum became the U.S. Census Bureau's first female supervisor.
As the chief of the Appointment Division—equivalent to today's Human Resources Division—she was responsible for hiring, corresponding with, and managing the work lives of more than 1,000 headquarters and 70,000 field workers during the 1920 Census.
Learn more about some of the talented people who have worked for the Census Bureau at our Notable Alumni webpage.
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Census Authors
Working for the U.S. Census Bureau inspired many famous authors!
Bernard Malamud worked for the Census Bureau's Agriculture Division and often wrote short stories during his lunch. His 1952 novel The Natural was adapted into a hit Hollywood movie. He won his first National Book Award for The Magic Barrel in 1958 and a Pulitzer Prize and second National Book Award for his 1967 novel The Fixer.
Crown Point, IN, native Thelma Strabel worked as a census taker before the Saturday Evening Post magazine serialized her 1940 novel Reap the Wild Wind. In 1942, Cecil B. DeMille directed a big screen adaptation of the novel starring John Wayne.
Science fiction writer Ann C. Crispin
was a Census Bureau computer programmer before authoring popular Star Wars and Star Trek books and the novelized versions of the V television series and movie Alien Resurrection.After working on the 1903 Census of the Philippines, Marcelino "Mena" Crisologo y Pecsan dedicated his career to Ilocano and Filipino art and culture. Along with publishing the first Ilocan language translation of the novel Don Quixote, Mena wrote novels, plays, and founded the Ilokanos Writers Association of the Philippines.
Author and historian Ken Hechler worked for the Census Bureau's population division during the 1940 Census. After World War II, he published The Bridge at Remagen in 1957 (which was made into a motion picture in 1969) and edited President Franklin D. Roosevelt's official papers. He later served as West Virginia's secretary of state and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Photo courtesy of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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For the Record
Ernest Hemingway volunteered to drive a Red Cross ambulance during World War I. He based his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms on his experiences during the war.
Other Red Cross volunteers who found fame after their World War I service include cartoonist Walt Disney, who served in and around Paris, France, after the November 1918 Armistice.
Tony Hulman—who owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1945 to 1977—drove ambulances for the Red Cross at the age of 17.
Suffrage, Civil Rights, and conservation activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas assisted refugee families in Paris, France.
McDonald's founder Ray Kroc lied about his age when he volunteered to become an ambulance driver at the age of 15. The war ended before he completed his training.
Ambulance driver and author E. E. Cummings based his novel The Enormous Room on the time he was imprisoned in a French jail after being charged with the crime of expressing anti-war sentiments.
Ernest Hemingway's close friend John Dos Passos was an ambulance driver on the Western and Italian Fronts before he published One Man's Initiation: 1917 in 1920 and the anti-war novel Three Soldiers in 1921.
Dos Passos and Hemingway later worked together as correspondents during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War, and collaborated on the screenplay for the 1937 anti-fascist film The Spanish Earth.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.
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