"Hemingway didn’t become known as a "literary he-man” without taking a few risks — in art and in life. From his
birth on this day, July 21, in 1899, to his death in 1961, he had nearly as
many real-life brushes with death as he assigned to his similarly he-manly
fictional characters.
He’d been obsessed with death ever since he confronted it —
and nearly succumbed to it — on an Italian battlefield during World War
I, and although he ultimately died of a self-inflicted gunshot
wound at age 61, while suffering from a number of disabling physical and mental
illnesses, the idea of facing down death at the hands of an enemy soldier, or
on the horns of a bull, had long captivated him and infused his writing.
Remarking on his concise but vivid prose, TIME noted in 1961: “Everything in
Hemingway is seen as it might be looked at by a man on the day he knew he would
die.”
True to his larger-than-life fortitude, Hemingway seemed to
court death wherever he went — and to do so with vigorous good humor. Here are
some of the many ways he almost went before his time:
1. Shredded by an Austrian mortar shell. During
World War I, Hemingway served on the Italian front lines as an ambulance driver
with the Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, per
TIME, he was “so badly wounded in a burst of shellfire that he felt
life slip from his body, ‘like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket
by one corner,’ and then return. He emerged with 237 bits of shrapnel (by his
own count), an aluminum kneecap, and two Italian decorations.”
2. Shot while wrangling a shark. In a 1935
dispatch for Esquire (headlined “On Being Shot Again,”, Hemingway doles out advice on how best to
kill a large animal: shoot it in the brain if it’s close, the heart if it’s far
or the spine if you need to stop it instantly. He was inspired to offer these
instructions, he writes, “on account of just having shot himself in the calves
of both legs” while attempting to gaff a shark on a fishing trip off Key West.
3. Hunting German subs from his fishing boat. During
1942 and 1943, Hemingway spent less time writing than he did aboard his 38-ft.
wooden fishing boat, armed with grenades and submachine guns, scanning the Gulf
Stream for German U-boats, according to Terry Mort, author of The
Hemingway Patrols. Hemingway knew that if he spotted an enemy
sub, it was unlikely that the Navy could respond quickly enough to destroy it.
“His solution,” Mort writes, “was characteristic: he would attack the U-boat —
suddenly and unexpectedly — and then run for it.” Luckily, Hemingway never had
the opportunity to put his reckless plan into action.
4. Downed in a plane crash. While
on an African safari in 1954, Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days.
In the first, a single-engine Cessna carrying Hemingway and his wife crashed
when the pilot attempted an emergency landing to avoid hitting a flock of
ibises. Forced to choose between “a sandpit where six crocodiles lay basking in
the sun or an elephant track through thick scrub,” the pilot chose the scrub, and the trio spent the night in the jungle,
surrounded by elephants. 
5. Another Crash on Take-off. The next day, the Ernest and Mary Hemingway boarded another small plane, which crashed on take-off and caught fire. Both were seriously injured, although not quite
badly enough to warrant the many newspaper headlines reporting their
deaths. Ernest Hemingway who was a large man had trouble
escaping and used his body to open the door of the plane and he was injured
badly in the process.
Hemingway never fully recovered from his injuries of the second crash. It was a short seven years later in the two-story house, which he bought in 1959 and wrote his books A Moveable Feast and The Dangerous Summer while at the house in Ketchum.
Hemingway moved to Ketchem after the nationalization of his house in Havana by Fidel Castro. The combination of his lack of mobility and the feelings that he was losing his ability to write to his high standards any longer, killed himself in the main entryway of the house, in 1961.
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