Ernest Hemingway.

The second of six children, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois to Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. His father, a physician, taught him hunting and fishing; his mother, who wanted a daughter, dressed him as a girl and called him Ernestine. The family home reflected his mother’s domineering nature, and his father later committed suicide. He graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1916 and began his writing career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, where he developed the minimalist style that defines his work.

Hemingway started his writing career at The Kansas City Star in 1916. He served as an ambulance driver in WWI and was severely wounded by mortar fire in July 1918. After the war, he wrote for the Toronto Star and moved to Paris in 1921. There, his first books Three Stories and Ten Poems 1923 and In Our Time 1924 were published. He met Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to the Lost Generation circle, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. His breakthrough novel The Sun Also Rises 1926 was followed by A Farewell to Arms 1929, drawn from his war experiences. During the Spanish Civil War he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940. In WWII he took part in the D-Day landings, earning a Bronze Star. His later years in Cuba produced The Old Man and the Sea 1952, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The 1958 film adaptation featured Spencer Tracy.

Hemingway married four times: Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in 1921 divorced 1927, Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 divorced 1940, Martha Gellhorn in 1940 divorced 1945, and Mary Welsh in 1946, who remained with him until his death. He had three sons: Jack with Hadley, Patrick and Gregory with Pauline; Gregory later transitioned and was known as Gloria. He suffered from bipolar disorder and insomnia, conditions worsened by chronic alcoholism, diabetes, and liver failure. In his later years, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy at the Menninger Clinic, which he claimed destroyed his memory. He died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.

Hemingway’s terse, economical style, known as the Iceberg Theory, influenced writers including Hunter S. Thompson. His Key West home is a museum visited by thousands, and his polydactyl cats remain a living legacy. In 1989, he was featured on a 25-cent US commemorative postage stamp. He is remembered for novels like The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms, and for his adventurous life as a war correspondent, deep-sea fisherman, and bullfighting aficionado.