After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United States in part due to
prohibition, in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599
Bathurst Street, now known as the Hemingway, in the
Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in
Toronto, Ontario. During his stay, he found a job with the
Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and
foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow
Star reporter
Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris.
For a short time from 1920 to 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago working for a small newspaper. In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife,
Hadley Richardson. After the
honeymoon they moved to a cramped top floor apartment on the 1300 block of
Clark Street. In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a then run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "The Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad.
At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, where Hemingway covered the
Greco-Turkish War for the
Star. After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to
Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in the
Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning of the American expatriate circle that became known as the "
Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel,
The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir,
A Moveable Feast. The epithet, "Lost Generation" was reportedly appropriated by Miss Stein from her French garage mechanic when he made the offhand comment that hers was "une generation perdue". His other influential mentor was
Ezra Pound, the founder of
imagism. Hemingway later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." The group often frequented
Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12
Rue de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's
Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States (Hemingway writes of meeting and talking with Joyce in Paris in
A Moveable Feast). His own first book, called
Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by
Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He asked Gertrude Stein to be John's
godmother. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the
Toronto Star and resigned on
January 1, 1924. Most of Hemingway's work for the Star was later published in the 1985 collection
Dateline: Toronto.
Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story cycle
In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as
in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "
Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.
In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of
The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the
Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They frequently exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife
Zelda, however, disliked Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque" and asserting that his macho persona was a facade, she became "convinced" that Ernest was homosexual and accused her husband of having an affair with him.
Some sources have speculated that Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on openly gay individuals, such as
Jean Cocteau, was overcompensation for latent homosexuality. In one such instance, an anecdote told by Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging
Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil", a salacious, phallic allusion. The proposed argument is that the rage against Cocteau and Radiguet (whose relationship has been heavily contested in other sources) shows an inherent hostility against homosexuals which also becomes a central theme of much of his short fiction, including "The Sea Change".
These relationships and long nights of excessive drinking provided inspiration for Hemingway's first successful novel,
The Sun Also Rises (1926), which took him only six weeks to finish at his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse,
La Closerie des Lilas. The novel was semi-autobiographical, following a group of expatriate Americans as they ambled around Europe. The novel was a success and met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write it after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for
The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married
Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout
Roman Catholic from
Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as
Vanity Fair and
Vogue. Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of
Men Without Women, a collection of
short stories, containing "
The Killers", one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories. In 1928, Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to
Key West, Florida, to begin their new life together. However, their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic event in Hemingway's life.
In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with
diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old
Civil War pistol. This greatly hurt Hemingway and is perhaps played out through Robert Jordan's fathers' suicide in the novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls. He immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and stirred up controversy by vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to
Hell. At about the same time,
Harry Crosby, founder of the
Black Sun Press and a friend of Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also committed suicide. In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born in Kansas City (his third son,
Gregory, would be born to the couple a few years later). It was a
Caesarean birth after difficult labor, details of which were incorporated into the concluding scene of
A Farewell to Arms.
Published in 1929,
A Farewell to Arms details the romance between
Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British
nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical: the plot is directly inspired by his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan; the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the real-life
Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is obscure, curiously, he had already appeared in
In Our Time.
A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's
Her Privates We,
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front,
Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and
Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. The success of
A Farewell to Arms made Hemingway financially independent.