Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduating from high school, he worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, before volunteering as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.
He later was severely wounded in this war after he transferred to the infantry. After the war, he moved to Paris and was influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
The Sun Also Rises(1926) was Hemingway's first critically acclaimed novel. In it, he details members of the "Lost Generation", young disillusioned men of the post World War I era. A Farewell to Arms(1929) is regarded as Hemingway's next important work.
For Whom the Bell Tolls(1940) chronicles the loss of freedom in the Spanish Civil War. The Old Man and the Sea(1953) is the famous short novel about a Cuban fisherman and his quest to finally capture a huge fish.
Hemingway spent time in Key West, Florida, Spain, and Africa after 1927. He was a war correspondent from 1936-1939 during the Spanish Civil War. After the war, Hemingway moved to Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 moved to Idaho. His death was thought to be a suicide.
Hemingway believed that to write well, you should experience first hand the subject about which you write. Although his prose seems a bit simple to the uninitiated, it is actually a direct way of telling a complex story. Hemingway is regarded as one of the finest American authors. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953(for Old Man and the Sea) and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
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