The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921.

In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, a group Hemingway later dubbed the "Lost Generation". He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. He covered the Spanish Civil War, inspiring his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and was present during the liberation of Paris in 1945. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He lived in Canada, Paris, Florida and Cuba before moving to Idaho where died in 1961.