Ernest Hemingway Read His Own Obituary. Then He Won the Nobel Prize.

Hemingway in his American Red Cross uniform, Milan, 1918. He was nineteen. (JFK Presidential Library)

In January 1954, a small plane carrying Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary clipped an abandoned telegraph wire over Murchison Falls in Uganda and went down in the bush. They survived the night surrounded by elephants and crocodiles. The next morning a rescue plane picked them up, rolled down a rough dirt strip, crashed on takeoff, and caught fire. The door jammed. Hemingway broke it open with his head and shoulder and walked out of the burning wreck.

By the time he reached civilization, the world's newspapers had already declared him dead. The obituaries were printed and on the streets. Reporters who found him said he showed up carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin. He spent the following weeks doing something almost nobody in history gets to do: reading his own obituaries over breakfast, correcting the errors as he went.

Ten months later he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hemingway writing at a campsite in Kenya, 1953. Within months he would walk away from two plane crashes in two days. (National Archives)

He never watched from the sidelines

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a doctor's son who spent his boyhood summers in the Michigan woods learning to fish, shoot, and handle himself outdoors. When the United States entered the First World War, he tried to enlist. The Army turned him down for a bad left eye.

Most people would have taken that as an answer. Hemingway signed on with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver instead and got himself to the Italian front. On July 8, 1918, while handing out chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers in the trenches near the Piave River, an Austrian mortar shell landed next to him. Doctors would eventually count more than two hundred pieces of shrapnel in his legs. He was eighteen years old. According to the official citation, he still carried a wounded Italian soldier toward the aid station before collapsing. Italy gave him its Silver Medal of Military Valor. He gave the world A Farewell to Arms.

Go and see for yourself

That became the pattern of his whole life. Where other writers worked from imagination, Hemingway worked from presence. He believed you could not write truly about anything you had not seen with your own eyes.

So he went. He covered the Spanish Civil War from Madrid while the shells came in. In the Second World War he crossed the English Channel on D-Day and watched the landings at Omaha Beach from a landing craft offshore. He attached himself to the 22nd Infantry Regiment and followed them through the hedgerows of Normandy. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Hemingway rolled into the city with the troops and headed straight for the Ritz, where by his own account he liberated the hotel bar.

Between wars, there was the sea. From Key West and later from his farm outside Havana, he fished the Gulf Stream in the Pilar, his 38-foot boat, hauling in marlin that outweighed grown men. During the war years he armed the Pilar and ran volunteer patrols hunting German U-boats off the Cuban coast. Those years on the water gave him The Old Man and the Sea, the short novel about an old fisherman and a giant marlin that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

Then came Africa, the two crashes, the obituaries, and the Nobel. He was too injured from the accidents to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, so the American ambassador read his speech for him. It included a line that tells you everything about how he saw the work: "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it."

Strong at the broken places

Hemingway put it best himself, in A Farewell to Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

He earned that sentence. The shrapnel, the wars, the crashes, the sea. He took the hits, did the work in person, and turned what he lived through into some of the most honest writing in the English language. He did not decorate his sentences and he did not decorate his life. Everything was built plain, to hold up under weight.

The knife that carries his name

That is the standard we were aiming at when we named the Hemingway folding knife after him.

It is a working man's gentleman knife. Scales of stained bone with a brass bolster and cap, the kind of materials that wear in instead of wearing out. A 2.875 inch drop point blade forged from 256 layers of 1095 and 15n20 steel in a twist Damascus pattern, so no two are ever alike. A lock back keeps it rigid when open. It rides in a full-grain leather sheath.

It is not a big knife, and that is the point. It is the knife you actually carry: for cutting line on the boat, opening a package, slicing a lime for a gin and tonic at the end of the day. The kind of tool a man who did everything himself would have kept in his pocket.

Hemingway read his own obituary and went back to work. Whatever is in front of you this week, that is the example. Show up in person. Do the work plain and true. Be strong at the broken places.