ERNEST HEMINGWAY July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961 Exit Strategy: Shotgun It’s not known exactly why as Hemingway didn’t leave a suicide note. What We could be sure of though, that if he had, it would have been economic. Hemingway first attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment. Some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for “putting him out of business” by destroying his memory; medical and scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view. Other members of Hemingway’s immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway’s paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway’s physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961

Exit Strategy: Shotgun

It’s not known exactly why as Hemingway didn’t leave a suicide note. What We could be sure of though, that if he had, it would have been economic. Hemingway first attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment. Some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for “putting him out of business” by destroying his memory; medical and scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view. Other members of Hemingway’s immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway’s paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway’s physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.


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