Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.

In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish War, then two years later resigned from journalism to devote himself to fiction.

Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel The Torrents of Spring that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books: Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experiences in the bestseller For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.