Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist,
short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and
understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had
a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous
lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later
generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and
the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He
published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction
works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three
nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are
considered classics of American literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a
reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the
Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he
was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed
the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).
In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved
to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the
influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost
Generation" expatriate community. Hemingway's debut novel
The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced Richardson
in 1927, and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned
from the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), which he covered as a journalist
and which was the basis for his novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Martha Gellhorn became his third
wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh in London
during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a
journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida (in the 1930s) and
in Cuba (in the 1940s and 1950s). He almost died in 1954 after plane
crashes on successive days, with injuries leaving him in pain and ill
health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in
Ketchum, Idaho, where, in mid-1961, he committed suicide.