Ernest Miller Hemingway (/ˈhɛmɪŋweɪ/ HEM-ing-way); July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. After high school, he spent six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918. In 1921, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and was influenced by the modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. In 1928, Hemingway returned to the U.S., where he settled in Key West, Florida. His experiences during the war supplied material for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.
In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, written in Havana, Cuba. During World War II, Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. In 1952, his novel The Old Man and the Sea was published to considerable acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. On a 1954 trip to Africa, Hemingway was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. He died of suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.
Early life
Ernest Hemingway Boyhood Home, Oak Park, Illinois Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago.[1] to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. His parents were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park,[2] a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to."[3] When Clarence and Grace Hemingway married in 1896, they lived with Grace's father, Ernest Miller Hall,[4] after whom they named their first son, the second of their six children.[2]
His sister Marcelline preceded him in 1898, and his younger siblings were Ursula in 1902, Madelaine in 1904, Carol in 1911, and Leicester in 1915.[2] Grace followed the Victorian convention of not differentiating children's clothing by gender. With only a year separating them, Ernest and Marcelline resembled one another strongly. Grace wanted them to appear as twins, so in Ernest's first three years she kept his hair long and dressed both children in similarly frilly feminine clothing.
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