Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is one of the greatest and most popular American writers of the first half of the 20th Century, having been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

He was born and grew up around Chicago, IL as a big baseball fan and later incorporated many references to baseball in his short stories and novels. Most prominent among these is The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1953, in which the titular old man, Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, is a baseball fanatic and discusses baseball with his former apprentice before setting off, and then recalls stories of his younger days as he is alone wrestling with a huge marlin on the high seas. The book was a huge best-seller and clinched the Nobel Prize for Hemingway.

Hemingway liked all kinds of sports, including boxing, football, bullfighting and hunting and fishing in addition to baseball, and all of them feature in his works. He cultivated an image of virility both in his lifestyle and in his sparse writing style, although by the end of his life it tended to verge on self-parody. After working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, where he reported on the Chicago Cubs passing through town, he was an ambulance driver for the U.S. Army during World War I and just before leaving for Europe, he caught a game between his beloved Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds, then kept the ticket stub as a souvenir while on the front, where he was seriously wounded. That relic is still extant and is now part of his archives kept by the public library in his birth city of Oak Park, IL. He apparently put some money on the White Sox in the infamous 1919 World Series, not aware that a fix was on, and obviously lost, but still remained a fan of the team.

While living in Cuba in the 1940s, he would hang around the Brooklyn Dodgers who held their spring training there, and once decided to show off his boxing skills by challenging a player to a fight. That player turned out to be Hugh Casey, who was younger and fitter than the writer, and who gave him a good licking. It was not the only time that he was bested in an improvised boxing match, as the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan recalls in his 1963 memoirs, That Summer in Paris, that he also got the best of Hemingway in such a bout. While in Paris, as part of the so-called postwar "Lost Generation" of writers, he attended the exhibition game between the New York Giants and White Sox at the site of the previous summer's Olympics, part of a European tour staged by the two teams in the Fall of 1924. Newspaper reports indicate that 90 percent of the sparse crowd who saw the game were Americans.

Further Reading

• Sean Kolodziej: "For Whom the Ballgame Tolls: Ernest Hemingway Attends a White Sox Game Before Shipping Off to War", The National Pastime, SABR, 51, 2023, pp. 36-37.