eached the war later as an ambulance driver for the Astro-Italian Army only to be wounded in the knee immediately after. The injury required dozens of operations to fix it, and became a central episode in both his real and creative life. He was decorated for heroism and became fascinated with a nurse which he based Catherine Barkley, the heroine of his novel "A Farewell To Arms" on. Hemingway returned to Michigan after the World Wars where he wrote about his war experiences. In 1921, Hemingway married and was commissioned as a traveling reporter for the Toronto Star. Hemingway worked at the craft of fiction with Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound in Paris during the era of the American expatriates. But the most important person he met was Gertrude Stein. She was a critic of all of Hemingway's works and advised him to cut out unnecessary description and to concentrate. Hemingway took the advice and spoke passionately about "the truest sentence that you know,"2 and of arriving through straight presentation of unvarnished fact at a "true, simple declarative sentence."3
             Hemingway married for the second time when he was thirty. He wrote his first m
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