Episode Details

Ernest Hemingway was wounded by a mortar shell at eighteen, and the trauma of that moment threaded through everything he wrote and everything he became. The spare, hard prose style that revolutionized American literature was not a literary affectation — it was the voice of a man who had learned to say as little as possible about the things that hurt the most.

This episode traces Hemingway from the Italian front in World War I through the Paris expatriate years, the Spanish Civil War, the Nobel Prize, and the physical and psychological deterioration that ended in his suicide at sixty-one.

• The mortar wound in Italy at eighteen and the trauma that defined his life and art
• The Paris years with Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald, and the birth of modernist American prose
• The Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the toll of decades spent chasing danger
• The physical collapse, the electroshock treatments, and the suicide that shocked the world