Hemingway, Ernest Miller

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899–1961), American short story writer and novelist. He worked as a reporter and served in 1918 as a volunteer with an ambulance unit on the Italian front, before settling in Paris among the American expatriate literary group, where he met Pound, G. Stein, F. M. Ford, and others described in his posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964). He made his name with The Sun Also Rises (1926; in England, as Fiesta, 1927), a novel which catches the post-war mood of disillusion of the so-called ‘lost generation’. A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of a love affair between an American lieutenant and an English nurse during the war on the Italian front, confirmed his position as one of the most influential writers of the time. His collections of short stories Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933) are especially notable. His growing dissatisfaction with contemporary culture was shown by his deliberate cultivation of the brutal and the primitive; he celebrated bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932) and big-game hunting in The Green Hills of Africa (1935). He actively supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is set against its background. In his later years he lived mostly in Cuba, where his passion for deep-sea fishing provided the setting for The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.