Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and began his writing career as a newspaperman in Kansas City at the age of 17. His experiences in Europe informed his early novels. Hemingway served with a volunteer ambulance unit in the Alps in World War I, lived in Paris for much of the 1920s, and reported on the Greek Revolution and the civil war in Spain. His sense of these events resulted in The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and, some think his greatest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway divided his time in much of the 1930s and 1940s between Key West, Florida and Cuba. He was an avid outdoorsman whose interest in such sports as hunting, fishing, and bull fighting were reflected in his novels and short stories. In Key West and Cuba, Hemingway discovered a passion for big-game fishing that would inspire him for the remainder of his life and that prompted his outstanding short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1951). This photograph, taken in Key West in the 1940s, shows Hemingway with a sailfish he had caught. Many of his novels, short stories, and his nonfiction work are classics of American literature, distinctive for their understatement, spare prose, and authentic characterization.