Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899. He was the son of a well-to-do doctor (who later committed suicide) and had a very active childhood hunting and fishing in the Great Lakes region with his father, boxing or playing rugby. In 1917 he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, this was a remarkable introduction to his career as a writer, since he started learning and gradually mastering the rigorous rules of 'pure objective writing’ characterised by declarative sentences without any unnecessary words or clichés. As soon as America decided to enter World War I, Hemingway tried to join the army but failed the medical examination due to poor eyesight . However, he was able to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in 1918 on the Italian front. 1924 he published his first collection of short stories, “In Our Time”. He started writing the novel “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), published as “Fiesta” in Britain, which showed his love of exotic settings and extreme situations where violent actions reveal the most important manly virtues: courage, comradeship and endurance . In 1929 he published “A Farewell to Arms”, a love story set among the horrors and sufferings of the war, and one of the best American novel ever written on World War I. In 1933, through his second wife's generosity he was able to buy a house in Key West and fulfil a lifelong dream going on an African huntine safari. This experience would lead to many stories, including the novel “The Green Hills of Africa” (1935) and perhaps his best short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936). During the Spanish Civil War he was a correspondent for an American news agency, and this experience was recorded in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Hemingway's post-war fiction led to controversial appraisals: The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won him the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He feared his physical decline and he was deeply depressed, and so committed suicide in 1961.
Only rarely did Hemingway write in an explicitly autobiographical way. The key experience of his childhood was the encounter with nature, which came about because of his passion for hunting and fishing. These sports were seen as forms of a struggle against nature in which man is rewarded for fighting with skill and courage, In this struggle, life and death are presented as the driving and mysterious forces of existence.
The Hemingway hero, modelled closely upon the author himself, remains basically the same from book to book. He is an outdoorsman, but he is not primitive; he is extremely sensitive to the chaotic world he lives. He wishes he were braver, but he does the best he can in stressful circumstances. In contrast to this kind of action hero is the “code hero”, so-called because he is able to live up to standards beyon the reach of ordinary human beings. He is honourable and extremely courageous.
For Hemingway, writing was a means of reaching and understanding his own identity, since he projected his life experiences into his prose. Because of this he created a dry, essential style characterised by simple syntax, colloquial, concise dialogue and brief descriptions - often of landscapes.