Hemingway, Ernest (Miller)

born July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Ill., U.S.

died July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho

U.S. writer.

He began work as a journalist after high school. He was wounded while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. One of a well-known group of expatriate writers in Paris, he soon embarked on a life of travel, skiing, fishing, and hunting that would be reflected in his work. His story collection In Our Time (1925) was followed by the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). Later novels include A Farewell to Arms (1929) and To Have and Have Not (1937). His lifelong love for Spain (including a fascination with bullfighting) led to his working as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, which resulted in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Other short-story collections include Men Without Women (1927), Winner Take Nothing (1933), and The Fifth Column (1938). He lived primarily in Cuba from с 1940, the locale of his novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952, Pulitzer Prize). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He left Cuba shortly after its 1959 revolution; a year later, depressed and ill, he shot himself. The succinct and concentrated prose style of his early works strongly influenced many British and American writers for decades.

Ernest Hemingway, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1959.

Courtesy of Mary Hemingway; photograph, © Karsh from Rapho/Photo Researchers

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