1899-1961
Writer

The Writer as Celebrity.

Ernest Hemingway became America's most famous and recognizable writer, combining literary genius with a life of action. He may have been more widely celebrated as a sportsman, warrior, traveler, and drinker than as a literary figure. It has been frequently remarked that Hemingway's greatest fictional character was Hemingway.

Early Fame.

The elder son in the large family of a devout doctor and a music teacher, Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, summering at Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, was prosperous and puritanical. In Michigan Hemingway found the material for his early fiction: events of sudden tragedy and pathos endured by the local Indians; the life-and-death consciousness of the hunter and fisherman; and the adept participant and empathic witness that he discovered in himself. Hemingway did not attend college. After graduating from high school...