Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Grace and Clarence Edmonds Hemingway. Hemingway first published his writing in the Oak Park High School newspaper, and he began his journalistic apprenticeship as a teen-age reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. Although his family expected him to attend college, Hemingway was drawn instead toward the excitement of World War I. In the spring of 1918 he volunteered with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver on the frontline in Italy; in July 1918, two weeks shy of his nineteenth birthday, he was wounded in battle.

After recovering from his wounds, and until he was able to make a living writing fiction, Hemingway supported himself as a journalist. He lived in Paris in the early 1920s and worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. His first important work of...