Ernest Hemingway
Blunt, adventurous and fiercely competitive, Hemingway turned war, sport and expatriate life into fiction written in a deliberately economical style. His public image as a man of action became almost as famous as his books.
Personality
Hemingway went looking for experience and wrote out of it: ambulance service in Italy, bullfighting in Spain, big-game hunting in Africa and front-line reporting from two wars. He was outspoken and blunt in public, and his friendships with other writers often soured; his friendship with Gertrude Stein ended in a literary quarrel that lasted decades, and his bond with F. Scott Fitzgerald mixed admiration with hostility. His style rested on discipline learned early. The Kansas City Star's rules of short sentences and vigorous English, which he absorbed as a young reporter, stayed at the base of his prose for the rest of his career.
Under pressure
At 18 Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel on the Italian front while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He later worked as a front-line correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and again from 1944 to 1945, receiving a Bronze Star in 1947 for having been under fire in combat areas. Criticism stung him and spurred him on: when Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) drew poor reviews, he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks. Two plane crashes in Africa in 1954 left him in pain and in declining health for the rest of his life.
The arc
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway went from high school to a reporting job at the Kansas City Star, then to the Italian front. As a Toronto Star correspondent in Paris in the 1920s he joined the expatriate circle of modernist writers and published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, followed by A Farewell to Arms in 1929. His Spanish Civil War reporting fed For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The Old Man and the Sea (1952) brought the Pulitzer Prize and preceded the 1954 Nobel Prize. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on 2 July 1961; his Paris memoir A Moveable Feast was published after his death.
Legacy
The Nobel committee honoured Hemingway for his mastery of the art of narrative and for the influence he had exerted on contemporary style, and that influence has lasted. His economical, understated prose became both a model and a target for generations of writers, and his novels and stories remain widely read and taught. Alongside the fiction he produced notable non-fiction, including Death in the Afternoon (1932), a treatise on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), and he wrote one play, The Fifth Column. He remains one of the most imitated and argued-over American writers of the twentieth century.
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