Ernest Hemingway is a legendary figure in twentieth- century American literature. His reputation stems not only from his body of written work, but from his adventurous and amorous lifestyle. His crisp, almost journalistic prose style, free of the long, sometimes flowery language common to much of the literature that appeared before him, has won him great acclaim and some of the highest literary honors: The Pulitzer Prize, which he won for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea in 1952; the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1954; and the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he also received in 1954.

Despite these accolades, Hemingway is not without his critics. Some scholars complain that his tough, often violent subject matter is limited and without insight, and that his female characters, in particular, lack dimension. His devotees claim that behind his work's often tough, macho exterior lurks a complex world of wounded, complicated human beings. His short stories are among those most frequently studied and anthologized, especially "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well Lighted Place," "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and "In Another Country," which was first published in 1927 in Scribner's magazine. His novels include such American classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. He has also written several works of nonfiction, including Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting, and The Green Hills of Africa, about big game hunting.