Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 23, 2010

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American writer and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his apparent life of adventure and the public image he cultivated. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and his career peaked in 1954 when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hemingway's fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that reverberated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. After leaving high school, he worked for a few months as a reporter before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was written in 1924. After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II, during which he was present at D-Day and the liberation of Paris. Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and '40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Idaho, where he committed suicide in mid 1961. (more...)

Recently featured: Raccoon – Jack the Ripper – Funerary art