![]() If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it." Whatever I had to do men had always done. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government-one of the first Americans so honored.Ĭommenting on this experience years later in Men at War, Hemingway wrote: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. "Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red," he recalled in a letter home.ĭespite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)ĭuring the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. Hemingway posed for this 1918 portrait in Milan, Italy. The topic of war has also been central to Hemingway forums and conferences organized by the Kennedy Library, including a recent session entitled " Writers on War." And at the Hemingway centennial, held at the library in 1999, many speakers referenced Hemingway's experience in war and his observations on its aftermath as an abiding element of his literary legacy. Scholars, including Seán Hemingway, the author's grandson and editor of the recent anthology, Hemingway on War, continue to use documents and photographs in the Hemingway Collection to educate others about Hemingway and his writings on war. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable frontlines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works. No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. Similarly he held his war experience close to his heart and demonstrated throughout his life a keen interest in war and its effects on those who live through it. Hemingway kept the piece of shrapnel, along with a small handful of other "charms" including a ring set with a bullet fragment, in a small leather change purse. ![]() Conversely, had Hemingway not been injured in that attack, he not may have fallen in love with his Red Cross nurse, a romance that served as the genesis of A Farewell to Arms, one of the century's most read war novels. Had the enemy mortar attack been more successful that fateful night, the world may never have known one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Though not as conspicuous, one object on display is far more consequential: a piece of shrapnel from the battlefield where Hemingway was wounded during World War I. But upon entering, it is hard not to notice the artifacts that ornament the Hemingway Room-including a mounted antelope head from a 1933 safari, an authentic lion-skin rug, and original artwork that Hemingway owned. Kennedy Presidential Library primarily to examine Ernest Hemingway's original manuscripts and his correspondence with family, friends, and fellow writers. Researchers come to the Hemingway archives at the John F.
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