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Polishing his star at Toronto newspapers

Author of the article: Susanna McLeod, Published Jul 23, 2026  •  4 minute read

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Destiny was calling. To respond, the young man believed hands-on learning was superior to traditional education. First tackling newspaper writing when he was a teenager in Missouri, Ernest Hemingway arrived in Toronto in 1920. He sharpened his skills in storytelling and writing at the Toronto Star Weekly and Toronto Daily Star. Travelling widely, the reporter wrote about people and places for his column, and those instances would later appear as facets in his renowned fiction novels.

Living in Oak Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Illinois, physician Dr. Clarence Hemingway and opera singer/musician Grace Hall Hemingway were parents to six children. Ernest Miller Hemingway was their second child, born on July 21, 1899 into a household bubbling with education, music and the love of outdoors. The family spent summers at their cottage at Walloon Lake, Michigan, and Hemingway’s father inspired his interests in fishing and hunting.

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“Hemingway always had ambitions to become a fiction writer,” said Toronto Public Library Blog (TPL) in “Ernest Hemingway’s Toronto Ties.” Encouraged by family to attend university, the teenager disagreed. “He believed the best way to learn the craft was by writing for newspapers,” just as several of his favourite literary writers did. Beginning with an eight-month apprenticeship in 1917 at Missouri’s Kansas City Star, Hemingway learned “how to mine the facts of a story and describe them simply and directly using the paper’s style sheet.” (The Kansas paper did not print his by-line.)

Interrupting his career path, Hemingway tried to enlist for duty during WWI, but poor eyesight prevented his plan. Instead, in early 1918, he joined the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen worker. The 18-year-old served in Italy, at Fossalta di Piave, “handing out coffee, chocolate, cigarettes and postcards to Italian soldiers in the trench,” wrote Steve Paul in “Young Mr. Hemingway in Italy” (The National WWI Museum and Memorial). While he was in the field on July 8, a mortar shell exploded nearby.

Severely wounded by over 200 metal shards from the blast, Hemingway “ended up spending most of the rest of the war in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan,” stated Paul. His lengthy hospital stay—and romance with an older nurse—became part of his second novel, A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929).

While at Walloon Lake in the summer of 1920, Hemingway was introduced to management of Toronto Daily Star. He was given the opportunity to write freelance articles for the paper’s weekend publication, Toronto Star Weekly. “Taking a Chance for a Free Shave” was published on March 6, 1920, including Hemingway’s first by-line, a moment of great pleasure for every writer.

Composing in his individual style, Hemingway flourished at Toronto. “His features were closer to fiction than hard news,” said TPL, and “he often wrote about sports, a theme that would appear in his novels.”

During Hemingway’s first days at the newspaper office, journalists discounted the man standing before them. Reporter Greg Clark considered the fresh-faced writer a “hanger-on.” Clark later wrote in his column that he told others, “Don’t get too chummy with this kid. He’ll stick you for ten bucks and that’ll be the end of him,” said William Burrill in The Toronto Years 1920-1924 (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1994). Little did Clark know that the awkward fledgling writer’s star would skyrocket.

Warming up to the staff and their office tales, Hemingway began telling stories of his own. His brilliant talent shone through. The Star Weekly’s editor, J.H. Cranston, “immediately found Hemingway to be a fascinating and credible storyteller,” Burrill stated. The editor hired Hemingway on a test basis, dependent on how well his story was written. If good, the writer would receive the standard rate of “half a cent per word.” Hemingway grabbed the opportunity, submitting absorbing columns.

In February 1921, Hemingway was offered the foreign correspondent’s job for Toronto Daily Star. Accepting the offer, he and his bride, Hadley, moved to Paris, France. (The couple were married for five years; he later married three more women.) Sending columns to the Toronto newspaper editor, Hemingway wrote about Spanish bullfights (which he enjoyed), horse racing, politics, war, and European culture.

Returning to Toronto in mid-1923, the Hemingways were about to be new parents. They wanted their child to be born where the hospitals “had an excellent reputation for caring for newborns and their mothers,” noted TPL. Now working at the daily paper, Hemingway earned a livable income. Their first son, “Jack” was born on October 10, 1923.

Staying in a hotel for several weeks, the Hemingways located a tiny apartment at Cedarvale Mansions at 1599 Bathurst Street, bordering a tree-lined ravine. The building’s impressive name did not match the apartments inside. The couple’s apartment “was nothing more than a small rectangular room with a Murphy bed and a balcony,” said Burrill. The size did not stop Hemingway from purchasing booze and inviting friends in to overindulge. Between his demanding post at the newspaper and small apartment, Hemingway was often depressed and found novel-writing troublesome.

On January 1, 1924, Hemingway prepared to leave Toronto to begin his fiction career in Europe. Toronto Star Weekly writer Greg Clark thought “he was a fool to give up the chance to write features for the hottest paper in Canada,” noted Burrill. Hemingway’s final article was published January 19, 1924 in Toronto Star Weekly, titled “The Freiburg Fedora: Must Wear Hats Like Other Folks If You Live in Toronto.”

Developing a magnificent literary career, Hemingway was awarded the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His most famous book was The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Among many familiar gripping works are For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Sun Also Rises (1926). However, the prolific author struggled with alcohol and depression. On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his Ketchum, Idaho home. The shining star had dimmed.

Commemorating Hemingway’s time in Canada, the Toronto Historical Board installed a plaque in 1985 at the author’s Bathurst Street apartment building. 998 words

Susanna McLeod is a writer living in Kingston, Ontario.

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