Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose economical, understated style profoundly influenced twentieth-century fiction. [1] His major works include the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, along with the novella The Old Man and the Sea. [2] He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. [3]
Early life and journalism
Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and spent boyhood summers at the family's lake house in northern Michigan, whose woods and waters later shaped his fiction. [1] After graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he began his career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, where the paper's terse style guide left a lasting mark on his prose. [2]
War and the expatriate years
During the First World War he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded in 1918. [1] In the early 1920s he settled in Paris as a foreign correspondent, joining the community of American and British expatriate writers—the so-called "Lost Generation"—that included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. [2] His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), drew on these years and established his reputation.
Major works
Hemingway's fiction is marked by short declarative sentences, understatement, and what he called the "iceberg theory," in which the deeper meaning of a story lies beneath its surface. [2] A Farewell to Arms (1929) drew on his wartime experience, while For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) grew out of his reporting on the Spanish Civil War. [1] His novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. [3]
Later years and death
Hemingway reported from the front during the Second World War and was decorated with the Bronze Star. [1] He later lived in Cuba and, in his final years, in Ketchum, Idaho, where declining physical and mental health increasingly troubled him. He died there on 2 July 1961. [1]
Legacy
Hemingway is regarded as one of the most influential prose stylists of the twentieth century, and his pared-down manner reshaped the way modern narrative is written. [2] Several works, including the Paris memoir A Moveable Feast, appeared posthumously, and his life and public persona have remained the subject of sustained scholarly and popular interest. [1]
