In 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ernest and his wife Martha flew to China to report on the Sino-Japanese War. Six months after the United States entered World War II, Hemingway armed his cabin cruiser, Pilar, and spent two years hunting German submarines in the Caribbean. (Grolier 2)
After finishing the Old Man and the Sea in 1952, and after discussing with Leland Hayward about making a film version of the novel, Ernest was eager to go another shooting safari in Africa. Most of Ernest’s thoughts were now of Africa. The pending business with Leland Hayward delayed his departure all through the spring of 1953, and he chafed at the postponement. For nearly three years, he said he had labored steadily at sea level. Now he was eager to "get up into the hills." He sharpened his shooting eye with quail-hunting expeditions into the back country, and banged away at pigeons in the Club de Cazadores. (Baker 508)
On the first Monday in May while he was fishing, he heard The Old Man and the Sea had won the Pulitzer fiction prize for 1952. He was very pleased as it was the only Pulitzer he had ever won.
They finally left on their trip, going to Spain for the bullfights and sightseeing. Then they went to Paris, and finally boarded a ship for the voyage to Mombasa. After several months in Africa, and shooting a lot of game, they left on January 21, 1954, in a Cessna plane. The plane crashed after flying into birds. The next day the plane they were taking burst into flames on take-off. Ernest had a concussion, a ruptured liver, spleen, and kidney, temporary loss of vision in the left eye, loss of hearing in the left ear, a crushed vertebra, a sprained right arm and shoulder, a sprained left leg, paralysis of the sphincter, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and head. Because of these injuries, he was unable to go to Sweden to accept the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature.
He enjoyed many activities such as bull-fights, deep sea fishing, and dude-ranching in Wyoming. He wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932) which was an exhaustive nonfiction survey of the art and sociology of the Spanish bullfight.
Despite two airplane crashes that ended his second African safari (1953-1954) and obliged him to accept the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature in absentia, Hemingway’s productivity continued in the late 1950’s with A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of his youth in Paris, and a three-part novel, Islands in the stream, about Bimini and Cuba. He also wrote sections of a new book about Africa and "The Dangerous summer", on the Spanish bullfights of 1959.
The End
By his sixtieth birthday in 1959, Hemingway’s health was beginning to fail. He had a serious kidney infection, and extremely high blood pressure. His mental health was also seriously impaired. In 1960 he left Cuba for Ketchum, Idaho, where he had recently acquired a house. After his second stay in Mayo Clinic and a series of shock treatments for his mental conditions, the doctors thought he was well enough to go home to Ketchum. When Mary came to get him, she knew that an enormous mistake was being made. Ernest was eager to go home, and she felt that she must comply. They reached Ketchum on Friday, June 30th, 1961.
Sunday morning Ernest awoke early, put on his red robe, and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. He went down into the basement and unlocked the gun storage room. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun, took some shells from one of the boxes, climbed back upstairs to the front foyer, slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers. (Baker 563-64)
After the electric-shocks his memory was fried by attempts to burn the depression out of his brain. With memory went insight and motivation to write. A whole universe of mourning descended. A depression that couldn’t be killed by electrical pulses. Only the double fisted thud of lead would do. He couldn’t write any more. His guard was down. The last punch was a knockout.
He loved to drink, hunt, and gamble. He loved beautiful women and moments of purity. He loved the company of trusted friends. He loved bullfights, boxing, rivalry and rebellion. He loved so many things so deeply. He overflowed, spilling them onto the page – through his fingertips – he inhaled life and exhaled words. They were the same to him. Now he’s holding his breath forever. (Hoerman 2-3)