Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, understated style influenced twentieth-century fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on 21 July 1899 and died at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on 2 July 1961. He learned his trade as a reporter on The Kansas City Star, then served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, where he was badly wounded in 1918. In the 1920s he lived in Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, among the expatriate writers and artists. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published there in 1923 by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing.

The Sun Also Rises (Scribner's, 1926) made his name, and A Farewell to Arms (1929) drew on his war service. In the 1930s he lived in Key West, Florida, and African safaris inspired Green Hills of Africa. He reported on the Spanish Civil War, the background to For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and covered the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris in 1944. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize.

For collectors. Three Stories and Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) was printed in an edition of only 300 copies. The Sun Also Rises was published by Charles Scribner's Sons on 22 October 1926 in a first printing of 5,090 copies, in a jacket illustrated by Cleo Damianakes. The first UK edition appeared from Jonathan Cape in 1927 under the title Fiesta, without the novel's two epigraphs.