(1899 – 1961)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois as the second of Hemingways' six children. His father taught him to hunt and fish and his mother taught him to the music but he never had a knack for music. In high school he was mediocre in sports. After graduating in 1917 he took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. After the U.S. joined the Allies in the fight against Germany and Austria in WW1 he tried to enlist the army, but he was deferred because of poor vision. He decided instead to sign up as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross.

Hemingway first went to Paris, then traveled to Milan. He had to carry mutilated bodies to a makeshift morgue; it very profoundly influenced his psychics and the works about the war horrors. After he was wounded by an explosion he recovered in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. All these events he described in novel A Farewell To Arms.

When Hemingway returned home from Italy, his parents didn't appreciated his experiences during the war and pressured him to find a job or to continue studying. Soon, Hemingway was offered the opportunity to write and a chance to work for the Toronto Star Weekly. In fall of 1920 he moved to Chicago and contributed to that newspaper. In September of 1921 he accepted an offer to work with the Toronto Daily Star as its European correspondent. Hemingway went to Paris, where he met a lot of famous writers, e. g. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and also painters Picasso and Miro.

Hemingway then became an editor of Transatlantic Review. From 1925 to 1929 Hemingway produced some of his most important works, that influenced literature all over the world in whole 20^th century – e.g. A Farewell to Arms, In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, Men Without Women. He divorced Hadley in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion reporter. In 1928 Hemingway and Pauline left Paris for Key West, Florida, in search of new surroundings to go with their new life together. They lived there for twelve years, and Hemingway found it a wonderful place to work and to play, discovering the sport of big game fishing. That same year he received word of his father's death by suicide. Ernest immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange for his funeral. Pauline soon gave birth to their son Patrick and then to Gregory, their last child. In 1933 the Hemingways and their friend Charles Thompson journeyed to Africa for a big game safari, which was reflected in his work Green Hills of Africa.

In 1937 Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. There he met a young writer, Martha Gelhorn, and they fell in love. After returning from Spain and divorcing Pauline, he and Martha moved to Cuba. In 1944 Hemingway decided to got to Europe to report the war, heading first to London, where he wrote about Royal Air Force. The marriage to Martha worsened and he met Mary Welsh.

After the WW2 he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, a novella about an aged fisherman and his battle with a giant marlin. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954 he won Nobel Prize for literature in absentia, because of his injuries caused by plane crash on his journey to Northern Africa. In 1960 he moved for Idaho, where he committed a suicide in 1961, caused by unsuccessful fight with paranoia.

Works: The Sun Also Rises; Men Without Women; A Farewell to Arms; Death in the Afternoon; To Have or Have Not; For Whom the Bell Tolls; In Our Times; Across the River and into the Trees; The Old Man and the Sea;

A Farewell to Arms - novel, simple prose, set on the Italian front. It relates the story of Frederic Henry, a U.S. ambulance driver, and his love for Catherine Barkley, a British nurse, who has helped him recuperate from leg wounds. Following the Italian retreat from Caporetto, during which Henry barely escapes execution for desertion, they flee to Switzerland. Their Swiss idyll terminates tragically, however, when Catherine dies in childbirth. The novel was filmed twice.

Old Man and the Sea – the novel tells the moving story of Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman who endures immense hardships in conquering a gigantic marlin, only to lose his prize to a succession of voracious sharks during the long voyage home in a skiff too small to accommodate his catch. In the interim he charged the story with many ulterior meanings and invoked Christian symbolism to suggest that, in Santiago's words, "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."