Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961 · United States
Known for: Nobel laureate who rebuilt the English sentence
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”
Biography
An ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front at 18, a Paris apprentice among the Lost Generation, a war correspondent on the beaches of Normandy: Hemingway lived like his prose, stripped, direct, dangerous. He cut every unnecessary word until what remained hit like a fist: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The Old Man and the Sea won him the Pulitzer and then the Nobel, whose citation praised his "mastery of the art of narrative." Behind the safari legend stood a man fighting depression his whole life; he lost that fight in Idaho in 1961. The iceberg theory he left behind, show one-eighth, let the rest pull beneath the surface, still teaches every writer alive.