Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was a journalist and fiction writer who became associated with the "Lost Generation" of American expatriates in Europe, and who helped to chronicle that group. The son of a doctor and a domineering singing instructor, Hemingway grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where as a toddler, his mother sometimes dressed him as a girl in clothes to match his older sister -- she had wanted twins, and he had failed to be a pair. Ernest rejected his mother's plans for him to pursue a career in music, and instead took to athletics and was a young outdoorsman, camping and hunting in the wilderness around his family's summer home in Michigan. He boxed in high school, but also discovered a love of literature and the sports writing of Ring Lardner.

Whatever creative urges he may have inherited from his mother directed themselves towards writing, and he decided not to go to college, choosing a career as a journalist like Lardner instead. He worked for the Kansas City Star briefly before joining the Red Cross Ambulance Corps on the Italian front of the first World War in 1918. It was a brief tour, but he witnessed a good deal of combat, in all its modern brutality. After three months, he was hit by stray machine-gun fire and wounded by a mortar shell; the last act of his career as an ambulance driver was to drag a wounded soldier to the ambulance, even while suffering his own injuries. Hemingway would later claim to have fought in the war for the Italian army, but in fact spent the rest of his time on the front working in a hospital -- with little to do, he passed the time with reading and drinking.

After leaving Europe at war's end, Hemingway seemed to have trouble staying still, moving back and forth from Chicago to Toronto and back to Chicago in the space of a year. He worked for several newspapers, married his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and met writer Sherwood Anderson, who was thirteen years older than him and had just published what is now his best-known work, Winesburg, Ohio. Hemingway's friendship with Anderson would last for six years, until Hemingway mocked Anderson's best-selling novel Dark Laughter, a book strongly influenced by (and Hemingway might have said a ripoff of) James Joyce's Ulysses.

During their friendship, though, Anderson was instrumental in the formation of the group that became known as the Lost Generation. He recommended Hemingway spend some time in post-war Europe, so Ernest went to Paris with his wife as a war correspondent for the Toronto Star, covering the events of the Turkish War of Independence which followed the World War. Anderson introduced Hemingway to the expatriate community from afar, by writing a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein, an author of Anderson's generation. Other expatriates in Europe, then and in the next few years, included Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald -- all of them literary giants, and all of them part of Hemingway's social circle. Most were in their twenties -- Anderson, Stein, and Pound were older but not significantly so -- and enjoyed the greater social and moral freedom of Europe (Prohibition had just gone into effect in the United States). The friendships among the members of the Lost Generation were passionate, and so arguments were also hurtful.

Hemingway was one of the last of the Lost to publish his fiction. His short story collection In Our Time was published in Europe in 1924, after fellow expatriate Fitzgerald's first two novels had turned him into an international best-seller and celebrity. While Fitzgerald's work -- especially his first novel, This Side of Paradise, written before his encounters with the expatriates -- could be ornate and decorative, Hemingway's was stripped-down. On Stein's advice, he eliminated any unnecessary words, especially adjectives. His short sentences could even seem choppy at times, blunt, and he initially worried that the literary community would not look beyond that to see his merit. He needn't have worried: he was well-received. He finally met Fitzgerald not long after -- though they knew the same people, they hadn't yet met in person -- and Fitzgerald became another mentor, as Stein and Anderson had been. Zelda Fitzgerald, Scott's wife, was already suffering some of the problems that would lead to her breakdowns -- and she couldn't stand Hemingway. She accused the two of having a homosexual affair, explaining their alternation between friendship and bickering thusly.

Around the time Hemingway alienated Anderson, he began to needle Fitzgerald as well. Ernest was a boisterous, macho man, a hard drinker and brawler -- Fitzgerald was Princeton-educated, given to pretensions, and though he drank often he wasn't known for being able to hold his liquor. It's ironic, then, that it's Hemingway who accused Fitzgerald of not being artistic enough -- of writing short stories Ernest felt were shoddy and sensational, things only written for the buck. Much of the blame for this, Hemingway put on Zelda, assuming that the couple's extravagant lifestyle was the wife's choice. In any case, it was Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which Hemingway read as Fitzgerald worked on it, that convinced Hemingway to write his own novel. The Sun Also Rises was as inspired by the Lost Generation as Fitzgerald's book was inspired by his courtship of Daisy and subsequent financial success, but Hemingway's book is more literally semi-autobiographical, while Fitzgerald's draws mostly on the emotional themes of his own life.

Another collection of short stories followed, in the wake of Hemingway's divorce and remarriage -- and his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, came on the heels of his father's suicide. The book rode the wave of popularity enjoyed by novels about the World War, and made Hemingway a major commercial success. The Lost Generation community fell apart amidst in-fighting and accusations -- homosexuality was one often leveled against Hemingway, who was vocally critical of homosexuals -- and it was also suggested that he had let his success go to his head. He moved to Key West, Florida, in 1931, a community he would remain associated with and which lay close to Cuba, a country he often visited. Most of his work was done in the 30s, in his Key West home; even so, he found time to go on safari, to travel to Spain (subject of much of his work), and to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist.

At the end of the decade he divorced again, and a month later remarried, to a fellow war correspondent he'd spent much of his free time with in Spain. He served as a sub hunter and war correspondent during World War II, divorced again, remarried again, and didn't publish a novel for ten years. When he broke that silence with 1950's Across The River and Through the Trees, it was met with the worst reviews of his career. The quieter, contemplative novella The Old Man and the Sea soon followed, and earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Still an outdoorsmen, he was unable to accept the Nobel Prize in person -- not long after surviving a plane crash so bad that several newspapers published his obituary, he was badly burned in a brushfire, which kept him confined while he recovered.

Thirty years after the peak of the expatriate community in Europe, Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, his memoir of the era, though it wasn't published until after his death. After an initial failed attempt, he committed suicide in 1961, a few weeks before his birthday. He had been received electroshock treatments as a remedy for his depression, but blamed the treatments for worsening his state of mind by ruining his memory. Depression probably ran in his family -- several relatives had committed suicide, and thirty-five years later, his granddaughter Margaux took her life with an overdose of pills.

He had continued to work in the last years of his life, and a number of his books were published posthumously. One of these, Islands in the Stream, was written in response to the criticism against Across The River and Through the Trees; though unfinished, a substantial portion of it was written, and his popular novella The Old Man And The Sea was intended to be its fourth and final part.