Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
American writer. Hemingway established himself as one of the leading American expatriates in Paris after World War I with the appearance of his novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Although he was based in Paris, he travelled a lot and nurtured his passion for bullfighting, fishing and hunting, a passion which was soon to become part of his writing, especially in non-fiction works such as Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935).
In 1929, he published one of his most famous novels, A Farewell to Arms - a partially autobiographical story about an American soldier fighting in Italy and falling in love with an English nurse while recovering from a wound in hospital.
During the Spanish civil war, Hemingway worked as a correspondent from the front. This experience produced one the author's finest and best-selling novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). In it, Hemingway deals with the horrors of the war, but also with the comradeship it generates among human beings. He took active part to World War II, both as a journalist and as a soldier. After the war, he returned to his home in Cuba. There he wrote The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short novel about a fisherman who hooks and boats a marlin but eventually has it eaten by sharks. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, and undoubtedly this book led him to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
In 1960, Hemingway left Cuba for Idaho, where he committed suicide the following year. Worth of notice are also his short stories, among which The Killers and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.