Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, in a big family of strongly religious

Protestants. He had four sisters and a younger brother. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, was a musician. Both were welleducated and well-respected in the conservative community of Oak Park. His father commit a suicide when Earnest were 30 years old, because of strong diabetes illness and a big loss of money. Hemingway was a good student. From 1913 until 1917, he attended Oak Park and River Forest High School where he took part in a number of sportsboxing, track and field, water polo, and football, affinity to which was provoked by his father. He took a journalism classes and later on he became an editor of the school newspaper. After his graduation he worked as a journalist and club reporter in the The Kansas City Star newspaper, for six months. He started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit of the Red Cross in the Italian army. On July 8th he was seriously wounded but showed great bravery and saved an Italian soldier for which he received the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor. While he was at the hospital recovering from his injuries, he met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky. They had planned marriage but she left him and engaged to an Italian officer. Several years later, this story becomes an inspiration for him and he wrote the novel Farewell to Arms. Hemingway is one of the greatest American authors. He established a stile to follow and become the spokesperson for the post World War I generation. Ernest had a strong influence on the 20th century fiction and also influenced with his adventurous life to the later generations. Many of his works are considered classics of the American literature. Some of the later American writers claim to be influenced by him. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".