Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1889. Upon his graduation from high school, he briefly worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before leaving the US to join the war effort on the Italian front of World War I. He served as an ambulance driver, but in 1918, he suffered a serious leg injury. After a stay in an army hospital in Milan, Italy, and successful surgery to treat his injury, he returned home, but not before having an intense romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse who treated him in the hospital. This love affair served as the basis of “A Very Short Story” and was also treated in Hemingway’s works “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway become an American literary icon known for both the understated concision of his prose, which was honed during his early career as a journalist, and his exploits as a sportsman, adventurer, and larger-than-life personality. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954).

In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. He returned overseas with her, working as a columnist for the Toronto Star in Paris.