Hemingway: Life is Courage
1899-1961
1899 1961
82.15W23.00N
LIT

CUBA
	What makes life meaningful? For American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway, it was courage. The characters in his works might not win, but they would live and die bravely.
	Hemingway is well known for his novels of war, big game hunting, fishing and bullfighting. One of his most famous works, "The Old Man and the Sea," describes an old fisherman's fight to keep a giant fish he caught from being eaten by sharks.
	Another of his famous works, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," describes a guerilla fighter during the Spanish Civil War who knew he was doomed to fail.
	For much of his life, Hemingway lived the life he described in his novels.
	He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent his summers in the outdoors, at Walloon Lake in Upper Michigan.
	He volunteered to fight in World War I, but was rejected for the army because of a bad eye. So he became an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was injured in 1918. The Italian government honored him for bravery. His novel, "A Farewell to Arms," draws upon his wartime experience in Italy.
	Hemingway became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and began writing novels. His first successful book was "The Sun Also Rises," a pessimistic look at the post-World War I generation.
	Later he raised money for the loyalist side during the Spain Civil War. In World War II, he organized an anti-submarine patrol off the coast of Cuba, where he was living, flew with Royal Air Force, and participated in the Normandy invasion.
	After the war he lived in Cuba with his fourth wife. In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
	He moved to Idaho when the communists came to power in Cuba, but suffered from depression and loss of memory. In 1961 he killed himself with a shotgun.
