Ernest Hemingway (Full name: Ernest Miller Hemingway), was an American author best known for novels and short stories. He is considered one of the most influential writers in American literature. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
He was born on 21 July, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, U.S. His father was a physician and his mother a musician.
At 17, he began his career as a cub-reporter for the Kansas City Star before volunteering as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross at the Italian front during World War 1. A few days before his 19th birthday, he was seriously wounded during a mortar attack. Despite his injuries, he helped evacuate Italian soldiers. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor for his bravery.
After his return to the United States, he got married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1921 two months after his 22 birthday. They moved to Paris a few months later after Hemingway was hired as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.
He began his writing career in Paris and in 1926; he published his first novel The Sun Also Rises. From mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, he produced most of his work including classics such as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bells Toll (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Hemingway published ten novels/novellas, nine short-story collections, and four nonfiction works. At least ten of his published worked were published posthumously.
On a trip to Africa in 1954, Hemingway was survived a plane crash over the Belgian Congo but he suffered injuries from which he never fully recovered. He died on 2 July, 1961 at the age of 61 after taking his life with a shotgun.
Hemingway’s influenced many fiction writers in the 20th century and his understated style of writing was widely imitated. If you want to know more about him, read his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) which chronicles his early life as a struggling journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920s.
Further Reading
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