Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style--which he termed the Iceberg Theory--had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park, a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to". For a short period after their marriage, Clarence and Grace Hemingway lived at first with Grace's father, Ernest Hall, their first son's namesake. Later, Ernest Hemingway would say that he disliked his name, which he "associated with the naive, even foolish hero of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest". The family eventually moved into a seven-bedroom home in a respectable neighborhood with a music studio for Grace and a medical office for Clarence. Hemingway's mother frequently performed in concerts around the village. As an adult, Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael S. Reynolds points out that Hemingway mirrored her energy and enthusiasm. Her insistence that he learn to play the cello became a "source of conflict", but he later admitted the music lessons were useful to his writing, as is evident in the "contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The family spent summers at Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. Hemingway's father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan as a young boy, early experiences in nature that instilled a passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas. From 1913 until 1917, Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School. He took part in a number of sports--boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He excelled in English classes, and with his sister Marcelline, performed in the school orchestra for two years. During his junior year he had a journalism class, structured "as though the classroom were a newspaper office", with better writers submitting pieces to the school newspaper, The Trapeze. Hemingway and Marcelline both had pieces submitted; Hemingway's first piece, published in January 1916, was about a local performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He edited the Trapeze and the Tabula (the yearbook), imitating the language of sportswriters, taking the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr.--a nod to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune whose byline was "Line O'Type". Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist; after leaving high school he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

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