Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was seventeen when he left a comfortable Illinois suburb for a Kansas City newspaper, where the house rule — short sentences, plain words, nothing left in that could be cut — became the spine of everything he wrote. In 1918 he sailed for Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver, and that July an Austrian mortar shell tore into his legs on the Piave front near Fossalta. He was nineteen, decorated for valour, and marked for the rest of his life.

In the Paris of the 1920s he fell in with the expatriate writers Gertrude Stein called a lost generation, and turned reporting into art: The Sun Also Rises in 1926, A Farewell to Arms in 1929, the terse, much-imitated prose that made him the most influential American stylist of the century. He covered the Spanish Civil War, hunted big game in Africa, fished the Gulf Stream off Key West and Cuba, and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The cost ran underneath all of it. He married four times, survived two plane crashes in Africa in 1954 that injured him permanently, and struggled for years with depression and heavy drinking. Treated with electroconvulsive therapy that damaged the memory he wrote from, he took his own life at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, in July 1961, at sixty-one.