Ernest Hemingway

Picture a boy in northern Michigan. The water is cold. The trees are tall. He is holding a fishing rod, and he is very, very quiet, because fish can hear you.

That boy was Ernest Hemingway. He was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a leafy town next to Chicago. He was the second of six children. His mother was Grace and his father was Clarence, a doctor.

Every summer the family went north to Michigan. There Ernest learned to fish, to hunt and to camp. At school he played the cello. He also boxed, ran track and played football. He liked to test himself. He liked to be outdoors. Those two things stayed with him all his life.

He grew up to be one of the most famous writers in the world. He won the biggest prize a writer can win. But the habits that made him great started small, by a lake, in the quiet.

A birth chart is a map of the sky at the moment a person was born. It shows where the Sun, the Moon and the planets were. Astrologers read that map like a set of clues about a person.

We know Ernest's birth time well. He was born at 8 in the morning, and that time comes from a birth record. Astrologers give that kind of record the top grade, AA. So we can trust the whole map, not just the date.

Your Sun sign is the one most people know. It is the sign the Sun was passing through on your birthday. Ernest's Sun was in Cancer, the sign of the crab. Western astrologers say a Cancer has a hard shell and a soft middle, like a crab. They care a lot about home, family and the people they love.

That fits him in a funny way. Ernest liked to look tough. He went to wars, hunted big animals and boxed. But his stories are full of tender things: a lost love, a hurt friend, an old man who will not give up. The shell was hard. The middle was soft.

After high school Ernest did not go to college. He got a job as a young reporter at a newspaper called the Kansas City Star. He worked there for six months.

The paper had a list of rules for how to write. The first ones were simple. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Ernest took those rules and never let them go. Years later, people said his writing sounded like nobody else's. Much of that sound came from this one job.

Here astrologers would point to his rising sign. Your rising sign is the sign that was coming up over the eastern edge of the sky at the moment you were born. It is a bit like the front door of your house. It is the part of you that people meet first.

Ernest had Virgo rising. Western astrologers say Virgo is the careful sign. Virgo likes to fix things, tidy things and get the small details right. A writer with Virgo rising, they would say, is a writer who cuts and trims every line. That is what Ernest did. He took words out until only the strong ones were left.

When Ernest was eighteen, there was a huge war in Europe. We now call it the First World War. He wanted to go. He joined the Red Cross and drove an ambulance in Italy, carrying hurt soldiers away from the fighting.

On 8 July 1918 a shell exploded near him. He was badly wounded in the legs. He spent months getting better in a hospital in Milan. He was given a medal by Italy for bravery.

Later he turned that time into a famous book, A Farewell to Arms. It is about a young American in the Italian war who falls in love with a nurse.

His chart has a planet that astrologers watch at moments like this. Mars is the planet of action, energy and fights. Ernest's Mars sat in Virgo, right in the part of the chart that stands for the body and how you meet the world. Astrologers say that kind of Mars wants to be where the action is, in body as well as mind. Ernest always went toward the noise, not away from it.

On 3 September 1921 Ernest married Hadley Richardson. They moved to Paris. He sent news stories to a newspaper and wrote his own stories at night and in cafés.

Paris was full of artists then. He got to know the writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. They read his work. They pushed him to be better. In 1923 Ernest and Hadley had a son, Jack.

In 1925 he started a novel on his own birthday. It came out in October 1926 as The Sun Also Rises. It is about a group of friends who travel from Paris to Spain to watch the bullfights. People said it changed the way Americans wrote.

Ernest had a name for his way of writing. He called it the iceberg. Only a small part of an iceberg sticks up out of the sea, about one eighth. The rest is hidden under the water. He thought a story should work the same way. Show a little. Let the reader feel the rest.

Here is where his Moon comes in. In a birth chart, the Moon stands for your feelings: what you need, what makes you feel safe, what you do when you are sad.

Ernest's Moon was in Capricorn, the sign of the goat. A mountain goat climbs slowly and carefully up steep rocks. Western astrologers say a Capricorn Moon keeps its feelings in order. It does not cry in public. It gets on with the job.

Put that next to the iceberg idea and it fits well. The feelings in his stories are huge, but they stay mostly under the water. A man talks about the weather while his heart is breaking. You do not get told he is sad. You just know.

Two links between his planets stand out. His Sun and Jupiter were at a sharp angle to each other, which astrologers call a square. Jupiter is the planet of big things, so this square, they say, gives big hungers: for travel, for adventure, for more. His Mercury, the planet of words, was in a smooth, friendly angle with Neptune, the planet of dreams. That one, astrologers say, helps a person turn daydreams into words.

Ernest's life got bigger and busier. He and Hadley split up. He married Pauline Pfeiffer, and they moved to Key West in Florida. They had two children, Patrick and Gloria. A Farewell to Arms came out on 27 September 1929, and now everyone knew his name.

On 27 February 1937 he sailed from New York to report on a war in Spain. That war gave him another big novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. From 1939 he lived in Cuba. He married Martha Gellhorn, who was also a war reporter. In the Second World War he wrote about the soldiers landing in France and about Paris being set free.

Then, on 1 September 1952, a magazine called Life printed his short book The Old Man and the Sea. It is about an old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, who has gone 84 days without a fish. He hooks a giant marlin and fights it for days. Then sharks come. The magazine sold 5.3 million copies in two days.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the top prize for a writer. I think The Old Man and the Sea is the best place for a young reader to start with him, because you can read it in a weekend and still be thinking about it a year later. // opinion

Chinese astrologers use a different map. In their system, every year has an animal and an element. Ernest was born in the year of the Earth Pig. They say the Pig loves good food, good company and the good things in life. Ernest loved all three. He liked big meals, long nights with friends and days on his fishing boat.

Chinese astrologers also look at the day you were born. They call it your Day Master, and it is a bit like your inner self. Ernest's Day Master was yang Metal. Think of an axe or a sword. Yang Metal, they say, is sharp, strong and plain. It cuts straight through. That is a good picture of his sentences.

There is one more number game. Your Life Path number comes from adding up all the digits of your birthday until you get one digit. Ernest's adds up to 1. Number lovers say a 1 is a leader who wants to go first and do it their own way. He did not copy other writers. Other writers copied him.

In January 1954 Ernest was in two plane crashes in Africa, one after the other. He lived, but he was badly hurt. After that he was often in pain. He was too ill to travel to Sweden to collect his Nobel Prize.

As he got older he had other illnesses too, such as liver disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. He drank a lot. He also had depression. Depression is an illness of the mind. It is not a weakness, and it can be treated. In his last years it was very hard on him.

In July 1961 Ernest died by suicide at his home in Idaho. He was 61. If you ever feel that low, or someone you know does, tell an adult you trust. Help is out there, and things can get better.

What he left behind is a way of writing. Short sentences. Plain words. A big feeling kept quietly under the surface. Many writers who came after him learned from it. His stories still show how much a few words can do.

So here is something to try. Next time you write about a day that mattered to you, leave something out. Do not say how you felt. Say what you saw. Let your reader find the rest under the water.