Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, journalist, writer of short stories, and winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature. He created a distinguished body for prose fiction, much of which was based on his adventurous life. Hemingway was the second of six children of Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Upon graduation from Oak Park High School in 1917, he chose journalism instead of college and spent seven educational months as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. Kept from the armed forces by deficient eyesight, Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, an experience that was later to provide the theme and locale for one of his most successful novels, "A Farewell to Arms." While serving temporarily as a canteen officer along the Piave River, he was severely wounded by shrapnel on July 1918. Following recuperation in Milan, he returned home in January 1919.
             Hemingway was eager to resume his former profession as a journalist, so he secured a part-time job as a feature writer for the Toronto Star. In the fall of 1920 he became contributing editor of a trade journal in Chicago and there he met Hadley Richardson, who he married in September 1921. Late in 1923, he returned briefly to Toronto, where their son John was born, but Europe still gleamed in Hemingway's imagination as the place to be. Early in 1924, he resigned from the Star returned to Paris, and launched his career as a serious writer. Hemingway divorced his wife Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. In 1928 he left Paris for Key West, Florida, and remained there for 12 years. There he completed A Farewell to Arms, progress on which was only temporarily inhibited by the birth of his second son, Patrick, and the suicide of his ailing father. The book was published to wide acclaim in 1929. Hemingway's next work, Death in the Afternoon, was an exhaustive nonfiction survey of the art and sociology of the Spanish bullfight. His third and last ...