oint to teach young Ernest about nature, taking him on his first trip to the woods when he was only seven weeks old. While the relationship with his father early in life was good, it deteriorated as Ernest got older. Rejecting his father's interest in science and his mother's attempts to turn him into a musician, he made many attempts to play several sports in his early years. He played football, ran, boxed, and swam on the various clubs in his Oak Park High School. Not being an exceptional athlete, the only sport he really excelled at was rifle marksmanship. His early school career was distinguished only for his achievements in English (Johnson 59-51). He wrote stories for the school magazine that were primarily concerned with the recording of physical action and heroic nostalgia. Being somewhat of an anti-intellectual, he showed no intentions of going on to the university level. Despite this, he continued to write, his style being an imitation of the popular Chicago Tribune columnist Ring Lardner. Lardner had developed a mock-illiterate style that was full of facetiousness and utterly American (Burgess 15-17). As Hemingway copied aspects of this style, its humor, subtleness, and silent pathos became a part of his life as well as his writing.
On April 6, 1917, the United States broke two and a half years of neutrality to declare war on Germany. Many young men were eager to fight the Germans, but Hemingway remained somewhat reluctant. Instead, he said goodbye to his family and went to Kansas City to write for the Kansas City Star (Meyers 22-26). When he got there, he found Kansas City to be a growing frontier city where law and order often took a back seat to crime and cynicism. He was given the Star style book which, in effect, told him to write about "what was there and not what wasn't there" (Burgess 17-19). This approach was later to be associated directly with Hemingway's writing style. Hemingway's situation in ...