Between the battlefields and the plane crashes, the hunting and
the bullfighting, the fishing and the boxing, the drinking and
the boasting, wherever did Ernest Hemingway find time to write?
But write he did. Hemingway produced ten novels, five books of
non-fiction, and scores of short stories, essays, and poems
before taking his life at the age of 61. An American original,
he was born in the comfortable Midwestern suburb of Oak Park,
Illinois, a place he described as full of "wide lawns and narrow
minds." He spent the rest of his life throwing himself outside
that comfort zone, constantly seeking new challenges, testing
himself and the people around him. In doing so, he took American
prose to a place it had never been—not just to the bullrings of
Pamplona and the safari camps of Kenya, but to a pared-down,
elegant style that condensed paragraphs of unspoken knowledge
into a single sentence that said it all. The most common
description of his writing style has been "hard-boiled";
Hemingway preferred to call i