On July 21, 1899, in the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, a baby boy was born into a doctor's family. His name was Ernest Miller Hemingway, and he would grow up to be one of the most famous writers America ever produced. As a kid, Ernest's father taught him to fish and hunt in the Michigan woods, while his mother filled the house with music. He wrote stories and edited the school newspaper, his teachers spotting something special.
Instead of going to college, 18-year-old Ernest got a job at the Kansas City Star newspaper, where he learned a writing style he'd use his whole life: short sentences, clear words, no fancy flourishes. He drove an ambulance in World War I, was wounded by a mortar shell, then moved to Paris in his twenties to write novels. There, he hung out at cafés with painters like Pablo Picasso and writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald. His first novel, 'The Sun Also Rises,' made him a star. He later wrote 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' and 'The Old Man and the Sea,' the story of a Cuban fisherman battling a giant marlin.
Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He went on safari in Africa, deep-sea-fished off Florida, watched bullfights in Spain, and reported from war zones. His tough, simple writing style - sometimes called the 'iceberg theory' because most of the meaning is hidden under the surface - changed how writers around the world tell stories. Schools still read his books, and his Key West home, where his six-toed cats' descendants still wander, is a popular museum today.
