Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

     Hemingway was a very talented American writer. He had quite an ordinary childhood. He was born in Chicago in 1899, and was the second of six children. His father was a doctor and his mother was a music teacher. He really loved the outdoor life and spent a lot of time walking, camping and fishing. He started to write at the age of 16. He started writing poems and short stories for his school magazine. He usually wrote about his own life. He left school at 18 and went to Italy to join the Red Cross. It was during the First World War. He drove an ambulance. He was badly wounded there. He was the first American to be wounded in the war. After the war he returned to America and married Hadley Richardson.

       In 1922 he and his wife went back to Europe (Paris) where he worked as a journalist, reporting news stories of all kinds. He met many famous writers in Paris and soon afterwards decided to give up journalism and write fiction. He wrote his first big novel "A farewell to Arms" in 1929. It was a story of love in wartime Italy. Then he wrote a novel called "For Whom the Bell Tolls?" in 1940. It was about the war in Spain. After that he didn't write fiction for a few years because he became a journalist again and reported on the Second World War. His next well-known book was "The old Man and the Sea", which was shorter than his other novels and that was his most successful book. In 1953, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. For the rest of his life, he suffered from illness and died in 1961.