He was at the “Star” when the United States joined the First World War. He wanted to fight, but was rejected from military service, so he joined the army as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He was sent to the Italian Front, and here was wounded near the river Piave. He was taken to hospital in Milan, and later wrote about his experience in the novel A Farewell to Arms, one of his best- sellers.

When he left school , he went to work as a journalist for the Kansas City daily newspaper “Star”. This was to be a crucial experience for his future carrier as a writer. Here he learned those rules for objectivity, simplicity, and correctness of language which helped him create that unique style of his that made him universally famous.

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 at Oak Park, a small town in Illinois, not far from Chicago, and grew up in a well-off, quite conformist family.

He had other jobs as a war correspondent, and led a very adventurous life, devoting much of his time to hunting , fishing and dangerous safaris in Africa, in one of which he was seriously wounded. He became quite a legend.

In October 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He failed to recover from his injuries, and that was a very sad,  troubled period of his life. In July 1961 he committed suicide.

He soon became famous and began a busy period of high-society life. In the meantime he published several collections of short stories, which further established his fame as a writer. In 1936 he went to Spain again, this time as a war correspondent in the Civil War. This experience inspired another of his best-sellers, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

When he returned to the States he started to work for the “Toronto Star Weekly”, and was sent back to Europe, to Paris this time, as a war correspondent. In Paris he met many others American intellectuals and writers, such as Gertrude Stain and Ezra Pound, and this was to be a very stimulating experience for him. He also made several trips to Spain, drawing inspiration for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises published in 1926.