Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was 61 years old when he shot and killed himself, 50 years ago, on July 2, 1961
Fifty years ago, on July 2, 1961, the writer who seemed to personify courage and strength put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Ernest Hemingway was 61 years old. He was a boxer, a boozer, a philanderer and big-game hunter who wrote some of the most sublime prose of the English language: short, sharp, piercing sentences that told stories about soldiers, lovers, hunters, bravery, fear and death.
Hemingway had seven novels published in his lifetime, including The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; six short story collections, and two memoirs. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, and he once wrote that he didn't regret that all the time he had spent shooting lions, catching marlins, chasing Nazi submarines, drinking, carousing and telling tall tales in bars had taken him away from his work. In 1938, he wrote: In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
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