Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 at Oak Park, a highly respectable suburb of Chicago, where his father, a keen sportsman, was a doctor. He was the second of six children. The family spent holidays in a lakeside hunting lodge in Michigan, near Indian settlements. Although energetic and successful in all school activities, Ernest twice ran away from home before joining the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter in 1917. Next year he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front and was badly wounded. Returning to America he began to write features for the Toronto Star Weekly in 1919 and was married in 1921. That year he came to Europe as a roving correspondent and covered several large conferences. In France he came into contact with Gertrude Stein—later they quarreled— Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. He covered the Greco-Turkish war in 1922. Three Stories and Two Poems was given a limited publication in Paris in 1923. Thereafter he gradually took to a life of bull-fighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing. He visited Spain during the Civil War. Latterly he lived mostly in Cuba, and he died in July 1961.
  He early established himself as the master of a new, tough, and peculiarly American style of writing and became a legend during his lifetime. But, as John Wain wrote in the Observer after his death, “Though there were many imitators there was never truly a ‘School of Hemingway’, because the standard he set was too severe.”
  His best-known books were A Farewell to Arms (1929), Death in the Afternoon (1932), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ernest Hemingway had three sons.