Robust and reckless, Hemingway was understated only in style

Fifty years ago today, Ernest Hemingway – who loved war and bullfights, hunting and fishing, marrying and leaving women, and drink – took his own life

HE WAS a man’s man and a man’s writer. Ernest Hemingway, who blew his brains out with his favourite shotgun in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, 50 years ago this morning at the age of 61, loved war and bullfights, hunting and fishing, marrying and leaving women, and drink. “Papa” Hemingway was larger than life, but his self-destructive streak was equal to his passion.

In the best scene of Woody Allen's otherwise disappointing Midnight in Paris, the actor Corey Stoll, who plays the Hemingway of the 1920s Lost Generation, discusses lion hunting, sex and death with a time-travelling American in a Paris taxi.

In another sequence, Hemingway argues with F Scott Fitzgerald, his real life mutual admirer and literary rival. The publication of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby in 1925 prompted Hemingway to publish a novel too. His first work of fiction, The Sun Also Rises, was completed the following year.

Hemingway got his first writing job, with the Kansas City Star,at age 17. He emulated sports writers, and followed the Star's guidelines for the rest of his life: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English." The following year, Hemingway volunteered to be an ambulance driver in the first World War. He was hit in the legs by shrapnel, but nonetheless carried a wounded Italian to safety, for which the Italian government gave him a medal. Hemingway was haunted by the soldier's fear of emasculation – the fate of Jake in The Sun Also Rises.

While convalescing, Hemingway fell in love with a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. She preferred an Italian officer to him, and he channelled his romantic disappointment into fiction. Throughout his life, Hemingway transformed experience – of ambulance driving, bullfighting, the Spanish Civil War, the second World War, African safaris and seafaring – into novels.

He married Hadley Richardson and moved to Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. The Paris Wife, a best-selling novel published this year by Paula McLain, recounts Hemingway's marriage to Hadley. Though eight years his senior, Hadley was naïve and slightly out of place in the frantic partying of 1920s Paris. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's paean to Paris, he describes seeing the sun glint in Hadley's hair on a train platform, and regretting he'd been unfaithful.

A Moveable Feast, published posthumously, was written shortly before Hemingway's death, from Paris notebooks that he had forgotten in storage in the Ritz hotel for 28 years.

Hemingway left Hadley for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he would leave in turn for the journalist Martha Gellhorn. Hemingway and Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War together, an adventure he fictionalised in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway's third marriage also ended bitterly, after Gellhorn was forced to cross the Atlantic on a ship carrying explosives during the second World War because he refused to get her a press pass. Hemingway hated washing, and Gellhorn called him "the pig". He told one of his sons that it was a pity to lose a woman one had taught to shoot.

Hemingway met his fourth and last wife, a Timemagazine reporter named Mary Welsh, in London during the war. Though he was still married to Gellhorn, he proposed to Welsh on their third meeting.

Hemingway’s arrival in Paris with US forces on August 25th, 1944, is legendary. He stopped to hug Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co before “liberating” the bar of the Ritz.

The Old Man and the Sea, about the struggle of an ageing Cuban fisherman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded Hemingway the prize for literature the following year. Hemingway said the book, written in eight weeks, was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". With his status as a celebrity writer, his spare prose and embittered, existential attitude, Hemingway seemed to embody 20th-century literature. His name and photograph are instantly recognised around the world, and he is so integral a part of American culture that both candidates in the 2008 presidential election cited him as their favourite writer.

Hemingway based his understated style on what he called the "iceberg theory", described thus in Death in the Afternoon: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Numerous illnesses and accidents were the price of Hemingway’s recklessness. Two plane crashes in Africa in 1952 left him with a fractured skull, dislocated shoulder, two cracked discs, a ruptured kidney and liver. He drank to dull the pain. By the end of the decade, his eyesight was failing and he underwent electroshock therapy for depression.

After his father’s suicide in 1928, Hemingway said, “I’ll probably go the same way.” A sister, brother and Hemingway’s grand-daughter Margaux, a former model and actress, all took their own lives – five Hemingways in four generations.