Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a physician and a musically gifted mother, and learned to fish and hunt on family summers in northern Michigan. After high school he spent six months as a reporter on The Kansas City Star, whose style rules favoured short sentences and vigorous English. In 1918, serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front, he was badly wounded — an experience that would echo through his fiction.

In Paris in the early 1920s, working as a foreign correspondent, he moved among Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald and developed his distinctive method: plain declarative sentences, repetition, dialogue stripped to essentials and an emotional charge held deliberately beneath the surface. The stories of In Our Time were followed by The Sun Also Rises, the portrait of a disillusioned expatriate generation, and A Farewell to Arms. His later life moved between Key West, Spain — where he reported on the Civil War that became the setting of For Whom the Bell Tolls — and Cuba. The recurring subject is the code by which men and women behave under pressure, in war, in the bullring and in love.

After a poorly received novel in 1950, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) restored his reputation and won the Pulitzer Prize. Two plane crashes in Africa in 1954 left him seriously injured, and he did not travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize that year. His health, physical and mental, declined, and he took his own life at Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris, appeared posthumously. His influence on the sound of twentieth-century prose has been pervasive.