Hemingway was born in Oak Park， Illinois. In 1917 he left his job as a reporter to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I （1914-1918）， where he was severely wounded. After the war he settled in Paris and was encouraged by American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway later lived in Key West， Florida， and traveled in Spain and Africa. He worked as a newspaper correspondent during both the Spanish Civil War （1936-1939） and World War II （1939-1945）。
Hemingway's earliest works include the collection of short stories In Our Time （1924）， which reflects his experiences as a youth in the northern Michigan woods. The novel that established Hemingway's reputation was The Sun Also Rises （1926）， the story of a group of expatriate Americans and Britons living in France， members of the so-called lost generation of the post-World War I period. Hemingway's second major novel was A Farewell to Arms （1929）， a love story set in wartime Italy. That novel was followed by two nonfiction works， Death in the Afternoon （1932） and Green Hills of Africa （1935）。
Hemingway's economical writing style often seems simple， but his method is used to complex effect. Hemingway wrote detached descriptions of action， using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely and eliminating the authorial viewpoint. His plain style contributed to the decline of the elaborate Victorian-era prose of much American writing in the early 20th century.
In the late 1930s Hemingway began to express concern about social problems. His novel To Have and Have Not （1937） condemned economic and political injustices. The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls （1940） portrays the conflict of the Spanish Civil War. In 1952 Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea， for which he won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
