Ernest Hemingway was a certified bad ass. Here are some facts you might not know about him. Check it out from Bespoke Post…
He didn’t take shit from anyone.
Hemingway ran into fellow author Max Eastman in their publisher’s office one day in 1937. Unfortunately for Eastman, Hemingway saw that one of Eastman’s new essays contained the line, “Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you.” Not one to have his masculinity questioned, Hemingway challenged Eastman to take his shirt off and see who had more chest hair (no surprise: Hemingway did.) Then Hemingway proceeded to hit Eastman in the face with his own book.
After showing up to an interview with the New York Times to detail the encounter with a black eye and covered in scars (all from unrelated fights), Hemingway said, “If Mr. Eastman takes his prowess seriously — if he has not, as it seems, gone in for fiction — then let him waive all medical rights and legal claims to damages, and I’ll put up $1,000 for any charity he favors or for himself. Then we’ll go into a room and he can read his book to me–the part of his book about me. Well, the best man unlocks the door.” His offer was (wisely) left unaccepted.
He drove around the front lines of WWI.
As an ambulance driver in Milan during WWI, Hemingway was hit by fragments of an Austrian mortar shell. And machine gun fire. At the same time. Neither of which stopped him from getting his fellow soldiers to safety and out of the line of fire, which earned him the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor, despite not even being Italian.
He has an odd definition of the word “vacation.”
Most people hear stories of Teddy Roosevelt’s pure, unadulterated manliness when he went on safari in Africa to hunt big game and are impressed. Hemingway heard them and said, “Challenge accepted.” Despite being hospitalized for part of his trip from a severe illness, Hemingway expertly tracked and hunted just about every monstrous animal that Africa had to offer and returned stateside with an overabundance of trophies.
Read more: Bespoke Post
