Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) (1955)

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His family took- him, as a boy, on frequent hunting and fishing trips and so acquainted him early with courage and endurance, which were later reflected in his fiction. After high school, he worked as a newspaper reporter and then went overseas to take part in World War I.

Ernest started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers.

After the war he lived for several years in Paris, where he became part of a group of Americans who felt alienated from their country. They considered themselves a lost generation. It was not long before he began publishing remarkable and completely individual short stories. The year he left Paris he published the powerful novel "The Sun Also Rises". His subjects were often war and its effects on people, or contests, such as hunting or bullfighting, which demand stamina and courage. Hemingway brilliantly described the war years in his antiwar novel "A Farewell to Arms" showing an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter.

During the National-Revolutionary War in Spain (1936-1939), Hemingway actively helped the republicans in their straggle against the fascist reaction. He used his experience as a reporter in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, "The Old Man and the Sea", the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat. Hemingway, himself a great sportsman, liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters. He showed primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society. Numerous short stories of Hemingway, "Green Hills of Africa", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and other stories attract attention of many readers. His novels are classics of the 20^th century. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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