The World's Greatest Novelist Died Once and Never Feared Death Again | Ernest Hemingway NDE

What happens after death? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century answered that question from a muddy field in Italy in 1918, and the answer shaped everything he ever wrote afterward.

Ernest Hemingway was 19 years old, serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, when an Austrian mortar shell exploded beside him at Fossalta di Piave. The soldier between him and the blast was killed instantly. Shrapnel tore into Hemingway's legs and body, and he lay in the darkness bleeding heavily, believing he was dying. And then he felt his soul come right out of his body, like pulling a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner, as he would write in A Farewell to Arms.

This episode tells the story of that experience. Hemingway described the sensation of separation from his own body as the most profound experience of his life. He was aware of being outside himself, watching, understanding what it felt like to be dead. He was carried to a field hospital, operated on, and eventually sent to Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse, the woman who became Catherine in his novel. But the memory of that moment never left him. He told his friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner that he had died and been brought back, and "I died once" became part of his legend.

The experience stripped him of the fear of death, and he said that freedom colored everything he did. His fiction, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, is steeped in the awareness of mortality that began on that night. A Farewell to Arms is in large part a meditation on death, survival, and the meaning of coming back from the grave. If you have ever asked what happens after death, listen to the Nobel Prize winner who died once, felt his soul leave his body, and spent the rest of his life writing about it.