Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. Hemingway was one of the great novelists of the 20th century, and his terse style has been imitated for decades.

He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where he had a fairly typical high school education – sports, the school orchestra, writing for both the school newspaper and the yearbook. After high school, Hemingway spent a few months as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, before signing up with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. He had been on the job for only a short time when he was wounded by mortar fire; he spent six months recovering in a Red Cross hospital in Milan.

Hemingway returned to North America in 1919, and accepted a position as a writer for the Toronto Star. In 1921, it was back to Europe – this time, to Paris, as a foreign correspondent. He became part of the city's large community of expatriate American artists, becoming good friends with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A few of Hemingway's short stories had been published in a small, private run in 1923, but his first real collection, In Our Time (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), was published in 1925, and was met with critical acclaim, particularly for the distinctive prose style. Hemingway would later describe his style as the "iceberg theory," saying that most of the story was kept below the surface. If the author truly understands the psychology and the deeper meaning behind what his characters are doing, Hemingway believed, then simply describing the surface behavior – the physical action, the dialogue – will be enough to let the reader pick up on those undercurrents. Hemingway wrote in short declarative sentences, using simple words; his punctuation was minimal, rarely anything more complex than a few commas and an occasional semi-colon.

Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises (e-book | print | audio), was published in 1926. It got mixed reviews, though it is today considered among his finest works. Better reviews came in 1929, when A Farewell to Arms (e-book | print | audio) was published. It told of the romance between an American soldier and an English nurse in Italy during World War I, and it was Hemingway's first best-seller.

Hemingway had been fascinated by bullfighting since first visiting Pamplona, Spain in the early 1920s. Pamplona had been the backdrop for much of The Sun Also Rises, and bullfighting was the subject of his first major work of nonfiction, Death in the Afternoon (e-book | print | audio). Similarly, a 1933 safari in East Africa would be the subject of the 1935 Green Hills of Africa (e-book | print | audio).

Hemingway was not a prolific writer. He struggled with health problems and depression for much of his life; he had a turbulent personal life, and was married four times. He wrote only one novel in the 1930s – To Have and Have Not (e-book | print | audio) – and only one in the 1940s – For Whom the Bell Tolls (e-book | print | audio).

The last novel published during Hemingway's lifetime was The Old Man and the Sea (e-book | print | audio), for which he was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. It was also cited by the committee which awarded Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was unable to attend the Nobel ceremony, as he was in the hospital recovering from injuries suffered in near-fatal plane crashes. That's "crashes," plural, on consecutive days. He was badly injured on a sightseeing flight over what was then the Belgian Congo; the next day, he got on a plane, headed for medical care at a larger hospital, and that plane exploded on take-off. When Hemingway finally arrived at the hospital, he found that reporters had arrived to cover the story of his death.

In 1956, while visiting Paris, Hemingway was reminded of trunks that he had stored at the Ritz Hotel, which contained writing that he had done during his time there in the 1920s. They would be the basis for the last major project he would undertake, the memoir A Moveable Feast (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), which was published posthumously in 1964. Two more novels were also published after Hemingway's death, Islands in the Stream (e-book | print | audio) in 1970 and The Garden of Eden (e-book | print | audio) in 1986.

Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961. His father had also died of suicide, and those who knew them both reported great similarities in their behavior and mental state during their final years and months. There has been some speculation that both men suffered from a hereditary inability to properly metabolize iron, and that iron overload may have been the cause of many of Hemingway's health problems.

In addition to his novels, Hemingway published several collections of short stories; they are gathered in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (e-book | print). Mary V. Dearborn's Ernest Hemingway (e-book | e-audio | print) is a comprehensive biography.

Also This Week

July 20, 1918

Cindy Walker was born. Walker was a country songwriter whose songs landed on the pop or country charts more than 400 times. Her first success came in the 1940s, when she wrote several songs for "King of Western Swing" Bob Wills, including "Sugar Moon" and "Bubbles in My Beer." Other major Walker songs include Jim Reeves' "Distant Drums" and Dean Martin's "In the Misty Moonlight." Willie Nelson's tribute album of Walker songs takes its name from her best-known song, "You Don't Know Me." Ironically, Walker's only hit as a performer was with a song she did not write, "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold."

July 18, 1943

Joseph J. Ellis was born. Ellis is a historian who specializes in the Revolutionary era and the lives of the Founding Fathers. He received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2001 for Founding Brothers (e-book | e-audio | print), a look at the complicated relationships and friendships among a half-dozen of the first American leaders; the History Channel documentary based on Ellis's book is available on DVD.

July 17, 1958

Wong Kar-wai was born. Wong is a Hong Kong director whose movies are noted for their dreamy visual style and for the importance of pop music to his storytelling. He prefers to work without a script, starting with only a vague plot outline and discovering the story through long improvisations with the actors. Wong's 2013 film The Grandmaster (streaming | DVD) is something of an outlier among his work, a martial arts drama loosely inspired by the life of Ip Man, the martial arts master who was one of Bruce Lee's principal teachers.

July 15 is National Ice Cream Day

Wherever the climate is warm, someone will figure out how to make tasty cold treats. The Ancient Greeks were mixing snow with fruit and honey as early as the 5th century BCE; Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, encouraged his patients to eat such ices, believing that they "increased the well-being." The first recipes for what we would now recognize as ice cream appears in 18th-century England, and ice cream has been a part of life in the United States since the colonial era. Today, it's relatively easy to make ice cream at home; Stef Ferrari offers basic recipes and unexpected flavor combinations in Ice Cream Adventures (e-book | print).