Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six
children. Their home was at Oak Park a Chicago suburb. In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas
City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the
Italian front where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to
America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before
resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed
his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style.
Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it
was the satirical novel The Torrents of Spring that established his name more widely. His
international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books Fiesta Men Without Women
and A Farewell to Arms. He was passionately involved with bullfighting big-game hunting and
deep-sea fishing and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and
described his experiences in the bestseller For Whom the Bell Tolls. His direct and
deceptively simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals. Recognition
of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
