"All I want to do is write well," he once said.

The man who could thus put the nuances of American baseball into the Spanish locutions of a humble fisherman; who rarely lost his sense of the humor that he found was as much a part of war and disaster as was courage itself, was born in Oak Park, Ill., a middle-class suburb of Chicago.

The date was July 21, 1899. Ernest Miller Hemingway was the second child of a family of six children; there were four sisters and a younger brother. His father was Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a large bearded physician who was more devoted to hunting and fishing than to his practice.

With his graduation from Oak Park High, he completed his formal education. He read widely, however, and had a natural facility for languages.

It was wartime, and torment for a spirited young man not to be in the fighting. Finally he managed to get to Italy, where he wangled his way into the fighting as a Red Cross ambulance driver with the Italian Army. Although he arrived too late for the great Italian rout at Caporetto, he learned all about it and described it brilliantly in "A Farewell to Arms," published in 1929.

It was in Paris that Mr. Hemingway began to write seriously. He was greatly aided by the advice of the austere and sometimes curmudgeonish Miss Stein, whose unadorned style of writing influenced him greatly. If she was exacting, she was also sympathetic, although she was inclined to deride Mr. Hemingway's mania for firearms and thereby often hurt his feelings.

After several trips back to the United States, Mr. Hemingway settled in Europe. But instead of sitting his life away at the Caf� des Deux Magots, as many of his contemporaries did, he worked hard at his writing.

He wrote with discernment about the persons around him. They were his expatriate countrymen, together with the "Lost Generation" British and general European post-war strays, and he limned them with deadly precision.

But more readers will remember the work as a tale of action and tragedy in the Florida Keys. They will recall not so much the social aspects of Harry Morgan's career, but probably the remarkable love affair between the doomed boatman and his slatternly wife. Mr. Hemingway might stir the "social consciousness" of individual readers; but if so, he did it by exact characterization, never by didactics.

Nor had Mr. Hemingway ever joined the caf�-sitters, who cheered on the progress of the Left. In 1936, with characteristic directness, he went to Spain. He covered the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. And in 1940 his novel of the Spanish Civil War, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," showed both that his own deepest sympathies were with the Loyalists, and that he was agonizingly aware of the destructive effect upon their cause of the Communist commissars.

Indeed, the novel was in the broadest sense a lament for everyone involved in the conflict. Its striking title came from John Donne, who had reminded that no man is an island, and had written (in his seventeenth "Devotion"):

"... never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

In the year World War II broke out, Mr. Hemingway took up residence in Cuba. But soon he was back in action in Europe, resuming the combat correspondence he had begun in Spain.

"The Old Man and the Sea," in 1952, pleased virtually everyone. It relied on the elemental drama of a fisherman who catches the greatest marlin of his life--only to have it eaten to the skeleton by sharks before he can get it to port.

Mr. Hemingway's first wife was a boyhood sweetheart, the former Hadley Richardson, whom he married in 1919. She accompanied him on one of his early trips to Paris. They were divorced in 1926.

The next year Mr. Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. This marriage was terminated by divorce in 1940 and in that year Mr. Hemingway married a novelist, Martha Gellhorn. After their divorce Mr. Hemingway married Miss Welsh.

A son, John, was born to Mr. Hemingway and his first wife. Two other sons, Patrick and Gregory, were born to the author and his second wife.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0721.html

The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in his early novel, . Thompson's later suicide by gunshot to the head mirrored Hemingway's, although he used a .45 and not a shotgun. Hemingway also provided a role model to fellow author and hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as "the poor man's Ernest Hemingway". In Latin American literature, Hemingway's impact can be seen in the work of fellow Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Suicide