Ernest Hemingway In Idaho

By Joe Berk

1500:  Keep that number in mind.  I’ll tell you what it means at the end of this post.


As I mentioned in the introductory blog on our ExNotes Idaho expedition, I was surprised to learn of the apparently well-known strong connection between Idaho and Ernest Hemingway.  My previous ignorance of this connection made me feel kind of illiterate when I read about it at the Basque Museum, and then again in Picabo while we were driving to Craters of the Moon National Monument. I wouldn’t want any of our readers to feel my pain, so I thought I would offer a brief Hemingway biography and explain how the Idaho/Hemingway connection developed.

I previously wrote about the Basque Museum a blog or two back.  Our next adventure was Craters of the Moon, and on our way there as we passed through the small town of Picabo I thought I would top off the Jeep and grab a cup of coffee.  The gas station had a small general store and a restaurant, so Susie and I grabbed lunch.  The place had an interesting corner devoted to Ernest Hemingway and his Idaho adventures.

Firearms Hemingway gave to local rancher Bud Purdy in a Picabo restaurant display case.

Hemingway loved hunting and fishing in the Silver Creek area near Picabo with Bud Purdy, a local rancher and Idaho legend.  Purdy was an interesting man, too.  You can read about him here.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois (a small town near Chicago) on July 21, 1899. He was wounded in World War I, he went on to become one of the world’s great novelists, he married four times, and he died at age 61 in Ketchum, Idaho. But there’s a lot more to the Hemingway story than just those two short sentences.

As a young man growing up in what was then a predominately rural area, Hemingway’s father introduced him to hunting and fishing. He graduated from the Oak Park public school system in 1917 and went to work as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. It’s been said that’s where he developed his writing style, based on the newspaper’s guidelines emphasizing short sentences and paragraphs, writing in the active style, shortness, and clarity. Hemingway carried the style to his fiction, later explaining “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them.”

When World War I started, Hemingway wanted to serve but poor eyesight prevented his enlisting. He instead volunteered to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. Hemingway was wounded only a month into this adventure by a mortar round, and then wounded again immediately after that by machine gun fire. All this occurred while carrying a wounded soldier to safety. The Italian government awarded Hemingway their Silver Medal for Valor.

Hemingway returned home and went to work for the Toronto Star Weekly, where he married his first of four wives in 1921. The Hemingways moved to Paris, where he met several of the great authors of the era while still working as a reporter covering such things as the Geneva Conference, bullfighting, and fishing. It was while Hemingway was in Paris that his first works of fiction were published, including Indian Camp and Cross Country Snow.

From 1925 to 1929, Hemingway wrote some of the world’s great literary masterpieces, including Our Time in 1925. It contained The Big Two-Hearted River, The Sun Also Rises, and Men Without Women. A Farewell to Arms followed in 1929, which was quickly recognized as a defining World War I masterpiece and earned Hemingway a reputation as a literary giant. Hemingway became a world traveler, visiting Key West for fishing, Africa for hunting, and Spain for bullfighting. He continued writing, creating For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon, and The Green Hills of Africa.

For a time in the pre-Castro days, Hemingway lived in Cuba. Hemingway lost his home when Fidel Castro confiscated private property in 1958. He and his fourth wife bought a home in Ketchum, Idaho, where he would live out the rest of his life.

Hemingway had spent time in Idaho prior to purchasing his Ketchum home. Averill Harriman (an American entrepreneur who owned the Union Pacific Railroad and other businesses) was promoting a new resort in Sun Valley, Idaho.  In 1939 Harriman invited Hemingway to visit the Sun Valley Lodge and that set the hook. Hemingway hunted and fished Idaho, and he fell in love with the area.  Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Room 206 of the Sun Valley Lodge (known today as the Hemingway Suite).  While a guest at the Sun Valley Lodge, Hemingway also wrote Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and A Moveable Feast.

Later in life, Hemingway struggled with poor health and depression. Some say he was an alcoholic. He had experienced numerous concussions, a couple of car accidents, and two airplane crashes. Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself in his Ketchum home in July of 1961 at the age of 61.

Ernest Hemingway was an outdoorsman, a shooter, and a hunter.  In other words, he was my kind of guy, so it’s surprising that the only Hemingway novel I ever read was The Old Man and the Sea.   That’s a character defect I aim to correct in the near future.


It’s probably appropriate that this post is about Ernest Hemingway, as this is our 1500th literary endeavor on the ExhaustNotes blog.  Yep, 1500 posts!  We appreciate you reading our blog, we appreciate your comments, and we especially appreciate you clicking on those pesky popup ads!


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20 thoughts on “Ernest Hemingway In Idaho”

  1. 1,500 is a big deal, so Kudos on that achievement. I did not know many things about Ernest Hemingway and his life, and you filled in a lot of the questions and gaps I had. I always wondered how he got to Wyoming and settled there. I had always thought he was a topical kind of guy.
    ” Honors and Benefits at such a young age!” is one of my favorite lines from “A Christmas Story” It fits here very well. Kudos!

  2. You left out his time in Key West, Gresh can probably fill you in for his years in the Keys.

  3. Interesting. Why do I confuse him with Steinbeck? If you want an interesting read, try the first 80 or so pages of “Log From The Sea Of Cortez”. Those pages are some of the best character descriptions I’ve ever read. Steinbeck is describing a man named Ed Ricketts, a man unfortunately none of us living souls have ever met. Oh, we were talking about Hemingway.

    1. Thanks, Marcus. I’ll check it out. I enjoy being around the Sea of Cortez. What might be cool is a ride around its shores, from Cabo all the way north and then down the other side on the mainland. I don’t know if that’s doable. It would make for a lot of cool blogs.

      1. Yes. And congratulations on 1500 blogs! I know I’ve not read them all. An interesting ride, which I’ve done twice on a motorcycle and once by car, is the Salton Sea. At least I find it interesting. It looks like the aftermath of WW3. I wouldn’t take the wife though. I doubt she’d like it. You might not like it either come to think of it but once you understand it’s history it’s a “must see”. And now that a large deposit of lithium has been found there, who knows?

        1. Marcus, I’ve ridden along and around the Salton Sea, both on motorcycles and in my car. It is an extremely interesting area. A friend of mine runs a scooter rally that circumnavigates the Salton Sea. If you’re going into Baja through Mexicali, the Salton Sea is on the way.

          Thanks for commenting.

  4. Hunter S. Thompson, another legendary writer, once had a chapter in one of his books called “The Scum Also Rises”. He was obviously a Hemingway fan.

      1. It’s a very good read and worth revisiting. Possibly the best urban sociology study I ever read. And obviously not on the syllabus at the University of Bath.

  5. And a favorite “Hemingway” bar – The Complete Angler on the island of Bimini.
    A bit of a boat ride best from the Fort Lauderdale area.
    A must go place for a refreshing beverage when in the area.
    Another “past life” when often in the area.
    Perhaps Gresh has been there back in his past life of the Keys.
    Looks like the best way to escape the intoxicating nature of boats is to move to a desert area.

  6. The first Hemingway book I ever read was Fiesta (not to be confused with the down-market 1980s UK skin-magazine) or (to avoid confusion, although probably not what Hemingway had in mind) The Sun Also Rises.

    Loved that book but I can’t get on with the rest of them. Nor could a friend who had to do them at university, couldn’t bear to read the whole books, so came up with a brilliant strategy: just rread the blurb on the back, expand on that and when you’re stuck, sprinkle the text you’ve written with a totally made-up-but-sounds-like-Hemingway quote, “That is the way it is in the mountains.”

    It worked. She got her English degree without having to wonder what American accent you’d have to fake to read the stuff aloud. Presumably, her tutors hadn’t read him either, or they’d have seen that the quote was invented.

    That is the way it is in the mountains.

    1. I’d quote you on that but folks wouldn’t think it was original.

      Thanks for commenting, Carl. Good to hear from you.

      1. You too, Joe. I have to write another piece for you soon, I think. Don’t worry, it won’t mention Tijuana, car exhaust or stripes painted on donkeys.

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