Islands in the Stream

About Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 the second of six children. In 1917 he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.