Probably the most famous American novelist of the 20th Century, Hemingway was born in affluent Oak Park, Illinois, but before he was more than a few month old already was in northern Michigan, where his parents were arranging the construction of a family cottage near Petoskey. His “Nick Adams” stories of childhood and young adulthood in Michigan–and beyond–are among his most famous, tracing Americans’ movement away from insularity to become players on the world stage, beginning with the First World War.
Often stereotyped as a macho adventurer writing about war, big game hunting and the like, he also had a sensitive side, and gender roles become increasingly more obvious as subject matter throughout his career. Like the earlier novelist Henry James, Hemingway was an interpreter of Europe to Americans; unlike James, he wrote a terse, spare prose influenced by early work as a journalist. Essentially, we all now write like Hemingway.
Best known works: In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), The Old Man and the Sea (1952, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature). (post by Fred Svoboda)