American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, declarative prose style is probably the single most imitated — and parodied — in 20th-century English-language literature. Hemingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy in the First World War (wounded at 18), worked as a Paris-based newspaper correspondent in the 1920s among the expatriate "Lost Generation," covered the Spanish Civil War as a partisan for the Republic, and by the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1954 had turned himself into one of the most recognizable public figures in American letters.
His style — short sentences, concrete nouns, minimal interior commentary, a deliberate refusal of the adjectival lushness Faulkner was building out of the same period — was not an absence of technique but a carefully engineered one. His "iceberg theory" held that the writer should render only the visible seventh of the story; the rest, if the writing is honest, is felt as weight beneath the prose. This method served a particular moral vision: life is a series of tests in which one can act with dignity or not, and the measure of a person (usually a man, usually in extremis) is what he does under pressure. "Grace under pressure" was his favored formulation of courage.
The Sun Also Rises (1926) gave the Lost Generation its novel. A Farewell to Arms (1929) fused his war memories with love and loss in a book whose ending is as controlled and devastating as anything he wrote. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), out of Spain, is his largest. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won him the Pulitzer and sealed the Nobel. His influence on writers from Joan Didion to Cormac McCarthy is enormous, though his characteristic masculinity has not aged evenly. He shot himself in 1961.