Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was a noted American author celebrated for his economical and understated prose style. He produced a notable body of work consisting of ten novels, ten short story collections, and seven non-fiction works, many of which are considered classics. Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois the second of six children of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. After a short stint as reporter following high school, he enlisted as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, where he suffered serious injury and returned home. His novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) draws on his experiences from this time. He returned to Europe as foreign correspondent following his marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson in 1922, settling in Paris and falling in with a group of expatriates and modernist artists and writers. His greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), portrays fictional versions of some these people on a journey from Paris to Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and bullfights, a topic he returned to in non-fiction in Death in the Afternoon (1932). He returned from Europe in 1928 and eventually settled in Key West with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, before leaving in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent. His experiences in the conflict led to his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and marriage to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, that same year, where the two lived in a villa outside Havana during the winter and at Ketchum, Idaho during the summer. Hemingway journeyed to China in 1941 and spent time as war correspondent in Europe in 1944 and 1945. IN 1951 he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea, which he considered “the best I can write for ever for all my life”, and which won the Pulitzer in 1952 and made him an international celebrity. He was in two near fatal plane crashes during a safari in Africa 1954 that left him in poor health and in great pain for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1954.