Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose understated, economical prose style profoundly shaped twentieth-century fiction. Raised in Oak Park, Illinois, he began his career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian Front during World War I. Seriously wounded in 1918, his wartime experiences later provided the foundational material for his acclaimed 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the early 1920s, Hemingway moved to Paris as a foreign correspondent, where he became a key figure among the "Lost Generation" of modernist expatriate writers.
Hemingway's debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926, establishing his literary reputation. After returning to the United States and settling in Key West, Florida, he continued to draw from his adventurous life for his writing. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist in 1937, an experience that inspired his celebrated 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. During World War II, he worked as a war correspondent, witnessing the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris alongside Allied troops.
In 1952, Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, a novella that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed significantly to his receipt of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Despite his immense literary success and public celebrity, his later years were plagued by ill health, exacerbated by surviving two plane crashes during a 1954 trip to Africa. Hemingway died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most influential writers of the modern era.
