Ernest Hemingway author page

Ernest Hemingway biography

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist.

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and began his writing career at age seventeen, working for the Kansas City Star. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy, where he was wounded and decorated by the Italian government.

In the early 1920s, Hemingway moved to Paris and worked as a foreign correspondent. He became associated with expatriate writers and artists in the “Lost Generation” milieu, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), helped establish his spare, understated narrative style. Subsequent novels include A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and the following year received the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded “for his mastery of the art of narrative … and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

Hemingway also worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. He travelled widely in Europe, Africa and Cuba, and many of his later works reflect these settings.

He died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

Selected recognition: Nobel Prize in Literature, 1954.