Ernest Hemingway was an American adventurer and is often referred to as a man's man. He was a sportsman and loved hunting, fishing and sailing. Sailing especially was something he cherished throughout his life. He sought out adventure and active environments early in life, and after graduation choose to became a journalist instead of going to university.

He was anxious to get amongst the action during the first world war, but was thwarted by an eye problem when he tried to enlist. He eventually volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross and managed to get close to the action near the Austro-Italian front line. He was injured during action and spent time recovering in Milan. During his recovery, he fell in love with a nurse, but she declined to marry him. He would refer back to these early times and experiences in later work.

Hemingway developed his writing skills during his time as a journalist, and he was influenced by writer Sherwood Anderson who advised him to move to Paris where there was an expatriate community of aspiring writers and poets, which he did in 1921 (with his new wife). He continued journalism in Paris as a foreign correspondent, and did well, but it was at this time he started to consider becoming an author.

He applied his outdoor interests and past experiences, and used writing techniques he had learnt from journalism - such as keeping sentences and paragraphs short with few adjectives, and stories that were easy to follow. He began by writing a collection of short stories which were published under the title In Our Time in 1925.

His concise writing style and subject matter proved popular, and at age twenty-five he wrote a full novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). He drew on his own experiences in Paris and wrote about a group of disillusioned expatriates who stayed on in post-war Europe and travelled to the festival of San Fermin in Spain, which included the spectacle of encierro - the running of the bulls in the streets as they made their way to the bullring. He became well-known in Paris and he continued to write.

In 1928, Hemingway returned to Key West in the USA (with his second wife) and published another collection of stories entitled Men Without Women which were down to earth and gritty stories about war, sportsmanship, matadors and killers, which some considered to be unnecessarily violent.

In 1929 his novel A Farewell to Arms again drew on past experiences and is a story about an American ambulance driver and an English nurse during the first world war. The novel was a success and highly praised by critics, and he became more financially secure as a result.

After the success of A Farewell to Arms he had the time and opportunity to travel. He went on game hunting trips in Africa and lived in Cuba for a while. He wrote about Spain and bullfighting in a novel entitled Death in the Afternoon in 1932, and he returned to Spain and reported on the Spanish Civil War in 1937. In 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls was published - the story of an American volunteer fighting against fascists in the war Hemingway had just experienced first-hand.

He continued as a correspondent during the second world war, after which he wrote a short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952). This earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 1954.

Later in life, he had personal issues and suffered from health problems including depression and mental deterioration. Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961 aged 61. He shot himself. He was a man of different times and values - today, some of his personal views and actions would probably cause advocates of political correctness to explode and anti-hunting groups great concern - however his writing technique (the iceberg theory or the theory of omission) is still an influence for writers, and his stories and novels are considered great works.

By Matt Sheen August MMXX - See video playlist for references

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