Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. It was a nice town. His father was a doctor. His mother wanted him to play the cello. He did not want to play the cello. After high school he got a job at a newspaper in Kansas City and learned to write short sentences about true things. Then the war came. He went to Italy as an ambulance driver and was badly wounded. He was eighteen. The wound taught him something about the world that he never forgot. He carried pieces of metal in his legs for the rest of his life.

He went to Paris. He was young and poor and married. He sat in cafés and wrote stories. He learned from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and from watching bullfights and fishing in cold rivers. He threw out every word that was not necessary. His first important books — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms — made him famous. He wrote about war and love and loss and men trying to be brave when things were bad. He wrote about what people said and what they did not say. The silence between the words was where the real story lived. Later came For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, and The Old Man and the Sea, about a fisherman in Cuba who would not give up. That book won him the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He lived big. He fished for marlin in the Gulf Stream. He hunted in Africa. He survived two plane crashes in two days. He drank and fought and married four times. But beneath all of it, he was a man who sat alone in a room each morning and tried to write one true sentence. That was the work. That was what mattered. He died in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. He was sixty-one years old. The sentences he left behind are still clean and hard and true, and they still do the thing he wanted them to do — make you feel it without anyone telling you what to feel.