Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. He began as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, whose style rules marked his prose for life. In 1918 he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front and was badly wounded, an experience that shaped his fiction. In 1920s Paris he joined the expatriate circle around Gertrude Stein and honed his craft.

The Sun Also Rises announced a new voice in 1926, and A Farewell to Arms confirmed it three years later. His method, the iceberg theory, left most of a story's meaning beneath the surface of plain declarative sentences. He reported on the Spanish Civil War, which yielded For Whom the Bell Tolls, and lived intensely in Key West and Cuba, drawn to bullfights, deep-sea fishing, and war.

The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 1954. Weighed down by injuries and declining health, Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His stripped-down style became the most imitated in American letters, teaching generations of writers that what is omitted can carry more weight than what is said. His books remain read worldwide.