Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He is best known for his economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers. Hemingway is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. During his lifetime, he wrote and published seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two works of non-fiction. Since his death, three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction autobiographical works have been published. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he worked as a reporter but within months left for the Italian front to be an ambulance driver in World War I. He was seriously injured and returned home within the year. He married his first wife Hadley Richardson in 1922 and moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During this time, Hemingway met and was influenced by writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the "Lost Generation". His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926.

In 1928, Hemingway returned to the U.S., settling in Key West, Florida. His experiences during the war supplied material for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1937, he went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. During World War II, Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. In 1952, his novel The Old Man and the Sea was published to considerable acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

On a 1954 trip to Africa, Hemingway was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. He died by suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s. His distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, influencing the development of 20th-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics of American literature.