Ernest Hemingway: The Boozy Genius With a Flair for the Dramatic

Ernest Hemingway was many things - a brilliant novelist, a rugged outdoorsman, and an insatiable drinker with enough swagger to make the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man" look like a fucking Cub Scout.

Born in 1899 to a respectable Illinois family, young Ernest showed an early proclivity for mischief and a total disregard for personal safety. As a child, he repeatedly attempted to recreate the bullfighting he saw in books and movies, charging at terrified neighborhood kids with a sharpened stick while making ridiculous "Olé!" noises like a pint-sized dumbass.

Hemingway's lust for daring adventures and copious alcohol consumption only grew as he aged. After a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I, he moved to Paris and drank heavily with other literary legends like F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway would frequently show up drunk to Parisian cafes, loudly proclaiming himself "The Champagne of Writers" while chugging red wine by the fucking liter.

His writing career took off with the smash success of novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Critics praised his spare, understated prose style, seemingly unaware that he wrote most of his books while plastered on a heroic combination of red wine, scotch, and whatever bathtub hooch was available during that bullshit Prohibition.

Hemingway's personal life was as dramatic and over-the-top as his writing. He married four times, had countless affairs, and constantly sought out perilous thrills like big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and running with the bulls in Pamplona (an activity he somehow survived despite being in a perpetual state of inebriation that would kill a normal man).

On one infamous occasion, Hemingway drunkenly picked a fight with a dozen burly merchant marines in a Havana bar, punching them repeatedly while slurring "You don't read me anymore? We'll see how good your fucking writing is when you're dead!" It took the entire Cuban police force to subdue the belligerent bastard.

In his later years, the hard-living Hemingway grew paranoid that the FBI was watching him (they were, the nosy pricks). He began carrying a shotgun everywhere he went, randomly firing at nearby trees while shouting "Take that, J. Edgar Hoover, you cross-dressing son of a bitch!" On more than one occasion, he accidentally shot out the windows of his beloved fishing boat, The Pilar.

Hemingway's final years were plagued by depression, alcoholism, and declining mental health. But even then, he maintained his trademark machismo. When a friend expressed concern over his condition, the author simply grunted "Writing's a damn sad thing. But it's a damn crazy fucking life too," before downing a glass of absinthe in a single gulp like a seasoned lush.

Ernest Hemingway died by suicide in 1961, taking his own life with "the true gen on this," as he called it - a shotgun blast to the head. It was a fittingly dramatic end for one of literature's most brilliant, boozy, foul-mouthed, and unapologetically over-the-top personalities. To this day, Hemingway remains an icon of rugged individualism, two-fisted drinking, and the eternal struggle to craft immaculate art while living deliriously like a drunken madman.