American novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, realistic dialogue, and emotional understatement. His use of deliberately uncomplicated vocabulary, sentence structure, and paragraph structure makes his style distinctive and poweful. His writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time, and many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature.
Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, and educated at his local high school. He became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, but left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, at the age of 18. He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was seriously wounded. After the war he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged and influenced in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War, he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II he was again a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. After the war Hemingway settled near Havana; around 1958 the Cuban revolution forced him to return to the United States. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961, from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after years of depression and, latterly, paranoia.
In his early works Hemingway depicted the lives of two types of people. The first consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The second type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances. His earliest works include collections of short stories: Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), his first work; In Our Time (1924), tales reflecting his youth; and Men Without Women (1927), a volume that included “The Killers”, remarkable for its description of impending doom. Winner Take Nothing (1933) contains stories such as “Today is Friday” in which two Roman soldiers discuss the crucifixion over wine.