Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduating from high school, he briefly wrote for The Kansas City Star before joining the Ambulance Corps during WWI. Hemingway’s experiences during WWI would later form the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1928). After the war, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris. Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. In the late 1930s, Hemingway documented the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). After publishing The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway went on an African safari where he was nearly killed in two separate plane crashes. Hemingway committed suicide at his Ketchum, Idaho home in 1961.