Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) is 'one of those who, honestly and undauntedly, reproduce the genuine features of the hard countenance of the age'.
From the Nobel Prize Citation
Born at Oak Park, a highly respectable suburb of Chicago, where his father, a keen sportsman was a doctor, he later moved to Europe. In 1918, he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He settled in Paris where he became friends with fellow -American expatriates, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style. He was passionate about sports, especially bull-fighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing and this passion is reflected in his writing. He early established himself as the master of a new, tough and peculiarly American style of writing and he became a legend during his lifetime. But, as John Wain wrote in the Observer after his death, "Though there were many imitators there was never truly a school of Hemingway," because the standard he set was too severe. His best-known books are A Farewell to Arms (1929), Death in the Afternoon (1932), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and The Sen (1952), which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. |
