Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, one of six children. His father was a successful doctor, his mother a music teacher. After high school, Hemingway began his writing career as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. When World War I broke out and an eye problem prevented him from joining the United States Army, he served as an ambulance driver with the Italian army.

After the war he returned to Europe as a journalist and also began his serious writing career. There he was part of the large community of expatriate artists and writers—Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among others.

Seriously injured in a 1953 plane crash in Africa, he never fully recovered his mental health or productivity. He committed suicide in 1961 in Idaho after years of suffering from despair and paranoia.

Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and a Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He was a prolific writer whose works include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), Death in the Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills of Africa (1935), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column (play, 1938), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), A Moveable Feast (posthumously in 1964), and Islands in the Stream (posthumously in 1970), The Garden of Eden (posthumously in 1986), and True at First Light (posthumously in 1999).