Florida Artists: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, a preeminent literary figure of the 20th century moved to Key West in 1928, living there periodically until 1940. Hemingway wrote all or part of his most famous works including A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro in Key West. In 1954, Ernest Hemingway became only the fifth American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea.

Ernest Hemingway, himself a great sportsman, liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women  and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories 

Death and violence were the two great constants in Hemingway's troubled, chaotic life. Fifty-one years later, Ernest Hemingway used a gun to kill himself. He was a tough, strong man with strong principles. Hemingway "believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end", yet he was blessed with talent and drive. That may have made it harder for him to admit his failures and correct them. Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961. In 2001, two of his books, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, would be named to the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library.