Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was one of the defining American writers of the twentieth century, known for prose stripped to its essentials: spare, direct, and deceptively simple. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he began as a journalist before serving as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War, an experience that would shape much of his writing. In the 1920s he settled in Paris, becoming part of the celebrated circle of expatriate writers and artists later associated with the Lost Generation.

Paris became both a home and a literary education for Hemingway, providing the setting and inspiration for works including The Sun Also Rises and, years later, his memoir A Moveable Feast. His novels and stories returned again and again to courage, love, war, loss, endurance, and the small rituals by which people attempt to live honourably in an uncertain world. Works such as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea established a style whose influence reached far beyond his own generation. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his mastery of narrative and his profound influence on contemporary prose.