Ernest Hemingway remains the most famous American novelist of the 20th century, judged by mentions in Google's corpus of books. His Wikipedia page also gets more views than those of contemporaries including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.
In the early 1920s Hemingway was a little-known journalist in Europe. In 1925 he published "In Our Time", a book of short stories, and began work on "The Sun Also Rises", his first novel, which fictionalised his expatriate life and became the most celebrated book about the "Lost Generation" in post-war Europe. Eight other novels and novellas followed. He won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel prize for literature.
His lean prose style was unlike anything before it. He favoured short, clean sentences and knew what to leave out: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." This approach influenced writers of fiction—notably Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Carver—as well as journalists. Joan Didion's spareness reads like sober Hemingway.
He defined courage as "grace under pressure". In 1955 John F. Kennedy asked for his permission to use this definition in "Profiles in Courage", which won the Pulitzer prize for biography. John McCain's favourite novel was "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), about the Spanish civil war. Barack Obama, a fan of the same novel, mentioned it in his eulogy to McCain.
Hemingway married four times, drank hard, feuded with rivals, was wounded in the first world war, reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second, ran with the bulls in Spain and survived a plane crash in Africa. Beneath the bravado his ego was fragile; he sometimes swapped gender roles in bed and suffered from depression. He was one of seven in his family to commit suicide. Ken Burns made a six-hour documentary series about him in 2021.
Adaptations of his work are scarce. Fitzgerald and Steinbeck enjoy higher ratings and more reviews on Goodreads.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro..."