Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899. Working in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen, Hemingway started his career as a writer. Before the United States had entered the World War I, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Hemingway was wounded while serving at the front, and later decorated by the Italian Government. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers. Later he was sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the 1920's, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter, was equally successful. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short novel about an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat, was the most outstanding.

Hemingway's straightforward prose, spare dialogue, and predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories. Some of his short stories are collected in Men Without Women (1927), The Fifth Column, and The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Ernest Miller Hemingway died in Idaho on July 2, 1961.

* From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967.