Ernest Hemingway

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Ernest Hemingway began his career as a journalist before serving as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. The experience of war, injury, and recovery would echo through much of his fiction. In the 1920s he lived in Paris among a circle of expatriate writers and artists, a period that helped inspire some of his best-known early work.

Hemingway went on to write major novels including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. Readers often connect him with a lean, understated style that made ordinary words carry enormous weight. In 1953 he received the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea, and in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His life was marked by adventure as well as strain: he reported on wars, spent time in Spain, Cuba, and Africa, and built a public image that was almost as famous as his books. He died in 1961, but his work remains central to American literature and continues to influence writers around the world.