Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose spare, understated prose style profoundly influenced twentieth-century fiction. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he worked as a newspaper reporter before driving ambulances in Italy during World War I, an experience that left him wounded and shaped much of his later writing. After the war, he joined the expatriate "Lost Generation" in Paris, where he refined his distinctive craft.

His works often explore courage, love, loss, and stoic endurance in the face of violence and death. His major novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), portraying disillusioned expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms (1929), a tragic wartime love story; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an aging fisherman's epic struggle with a giant marlin. The latter won the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Famed for his adventurous life of hunting, fishing, bullfighting, and war reporting, Hemingway came to embody the rugged heroism of his characters. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961, leaving behind an enduring literary legacy.