Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois and began his writing career as a journalist for the Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home after being seriously wounded. In 1921, he settled in Paris, where he became part of a burgeoning American expatriate circle. His acclaimed novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926 and established him as both the voice of the “lost generation” and the preeminent writer of his time. Hemingway returned to the United States in 1927 and two years later published A Farewell to Arms. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939). He earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. Before the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution. During the twenties, 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). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. 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 most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway -- himself a great sportsman -- liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
© The Nobel Foundation 1954.
