Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was a towering figure of 20th-century American literature, renowned for his distinctive style of understatement and directness. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I, an experience that deeply informed his early novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), a tragic love story set against the war's backdrop. He was part of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris, where he honed his craft alongside other modernists. His other major works include The Sun Also Rises (1926), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won the Pulitzer Prize and helped secure him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway's influence on prose style—lean, muscular, and stripped of ornament—was profound, shaping generations of writers. He died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.