Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s life took him from Oak Park, Illinois, to the battlefields of Italy, the cafés of Paris, the Florida Keys and Cuba. A reporter before he became a celebrated writer, he sought out travel, sport and adventure, and fashioned a public image of fearlessness. His quieter enthusiasms reveal another side: he was a devoted reader, a collector of books and a great lover of cats.

The man behind that image was complicated and often very difficult. His experiences as a young ambulance driver in Italy and later as a war correspondent found their way into fiction marked by courage, loss and disillusionment. He wrote novels, journalism and short stories, in which spare dialogue and careful understatement became hallmarks of his style. Works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls drew on the people and upheavals he had encountered; The Old Man and the Sea brought him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The following year, the Nobel Prize recognised both his narrative mastery and his influence on contemporary literature.