As a young man Hemingway served with the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in France in the last year of WW I. Later he worked as a journalist, covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Toronto Star. He made frequent trips to Spain and the Austrian Alps but for the most part was based in Paris.

His novel 'The Sun Also Rises' (1926) gained him instant acclaim, while his next novel, 'A Farewell to Arms' (1929), advanced him to the front ranks of contemporary writers.

He returned to the US in 1927 but in 1937 Hemingway went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, an event that led to his story 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Later he won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel 'The Old Man and the Sea' written in Cuba.

In his later years Hemingway became prone to mental depression, and eventually a form of paranoia; he committed suicide by shooting him-self at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.