Ernest Hemingway never went to college

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a Chicago suburb, the first son of doctor Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. He was educated in public schools and began writing in high school, where he was active and outstanding, but the summers he spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan were the most important parts of his childhood. He did not attend college after graduating from high school in 1917, preferring to live in a less sheltered environment. Instead, he moved to Kansas City. Hemingway graduated from high school and went to work as a cub reporter for 'The Star' in Kansas City. It was his first job after high school, and his writing clearly needed improvement. There's no doubt that the training he received there helped shape him into the legend he became.

He was repeatedly turned down for military service due to an eye defect, but he made it into World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave on July 8, 1918, when he was only 19 years old. He fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who refused to marry him after he was decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan. These were memories he would never forget.