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Born in unexciting Oak Park, Illinois, in 1898, Ernest grew-up comfortably. His family consisted of his two sisters, his mother, and his father, a local doctor.

Very early, young Ernest yearned to escape his small town. He wanted adventure, but there was no longer an American frontier to explore. The country was rushing to embrace industry and urban living.

Hemingway’s hero throughout his youth was Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman, big game hunter and poker player. T.R. led the legendary Rough Riders, a collection of cowboys, Native Americans, African Americans, and professional gamblers, in the famous charge up San Juan Hill to win the Spanish-American War.

For young Hemingway, the measure of a man was not just his competitiveness, but his will to win. One biographer writes, “It was never a game with Hemingway, fishing, hunting, tennis …became tests of manhood.”

In high school, Ernest was a good athlete and excelled at boxing and football. He and his buddies had secret poker games and took pride in their courage to walk on the wild side. Gambling was a sin in Oak Park.

One of Hemingway’s earliest boyhood efforts at writing included a story about a poker game in which the “pigeon” outsmarts the cheat. Gamblers, boxers and soldiers filled his early work. When he was 14, some of his school friends were arrested for shooting craps.

After graduating from high school in 1917, Ernest was anxious to get into World War I before it ended. However, the military would not take him because of defective vision in one eye.

Determined not to miss the war experience, he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and was sent to Italy. A month after arriving he was seriously injured when a shell landed nearby. He became the first American wounded in Italy.

After the war’s end, Ernest became a newspaper correspondent living among other Left Bank expatriates in Paris. Disillusionment with war and cynicism became the hallmark of “the lost generation”. In typical Hemingway bravado, he would say, “Shells are all the same. If they don’t hit you, there’s no story, and if they do, you don’t have to write it.”

As a young man, Ernest was a good amateur boxer. Living in Paris, he frequently attended and bet the fights. In excellent shape, he was often earned extra money, 10 francs a round, as a sparring partner for local professional heavyweights.

Ernest started writing fiction in Paris and soon became a recognized, respected author in the U.S. for his much acclaimed The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). In both works, he captures the taste, texture and terror of war.

During his years in Europe, Hemingway became an enthusiastic horse better. In A Moveable Feast, about his years in Paris during the Twenties, he confesses, “I was going to the races alone…involved in them and getting too mixed up with them. I worked two tracks in their season.” Eventually, he made himself stop going to the races. He admitted, “I was glad but it left an emptiness”.

An excellent marksman, pigeon shoots were another of his favorite pastimes. Betting always attended such contests and Ernest usually did well. During one private club competition, he won five of six shoots.

Occasionally he and friends visited Austria. Although gambling was illegal, poker games went on every evening in the hotel. Among the participants were the hotel keeper, the local police captain, a banker and lawyer. The games were more occasions for drinkingand laughing than checking and raising.

In Spain, Hemingway became infatuated with bullfights. He admired the deadly ballet matching the art and athleticism of the matador against 1,500 lbs. of brute rage. He captured the primordial struggle in Death in the Afternoon. It was man against beast, a theme he’d repeat in his last great work, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in literature.

Later in life, success allowed Hemingway to spend more time in his favorite leisure pursuits - trophy fishing and big game hunting. Gambling often accompanied his adventures. Following several days hunting grizzly bears and elk in Wyoming, Ernest lost $900 in the evening craps game.

Poker was often a part of the activities. Director John Huston, actor John Wayne and renowned photographer Robert Capa were among Ernest’s poker playing buddies.

Hemingway considered himself to be a good pokerplayer. Consistent with his personality, he was an aggressive, take-no-prisoners kind of player. When it came to playing the game, his advice was: “Never call; either raise or put it down.”

And, that’s how Ernest Hemingway lived life - he never just called, he bet it hard and heavy. When he could no longer play the game, he folded.

When his health began to deteriorate and he could not continue to live or write in his customary fashion, he went to Ketchum, Idaho, a favorite retreat. On a sunny Sunday morning in 1961 he took a double-barreled shotgun, slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt to the floor, pressed both barrels to his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.

The End.

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