Hemingway, Ernest

American author, born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father Clarence was a doctor and his mother Grace a singing teacher. The family also had five sisters. After high school, when 17 years old, Ernest began working as a journalist for the Kansas City Star newspaper in Missouri. During the final phase of the First World War, he participated as a volunteer ambulance driver at the front in Italy and was seriously wounded in 1918 at Piave. After the war, he again worked as a journalist but quickly made a name for himself as an author. In 1920 he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives, and moved to France. In 1922-28, he was one of the American so-called expatriate authors in Paris, among whom he was influenced especially by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He also cultivated other literary contacts, e.g. with the British author and publisher Ford Maddox Ford.