Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. After a brief stint as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway joined a volunteer American Red Cross unit as a driver in World War 1. He served in Italy and was seriously wounded during an Austrian attack. Shortly after the war, Hemingway lived in Paris, where he became a key figure of what is sometimes called the "Lost Generation." The term refers generally to the post-World War I generation, whose members felt disillusioned with the war and its consequences; more specifically, the term refers to a group of leading writers and artists of the period. This was the time in which Hemingway began work on A Farewell to Arms, a novel that epitomized his disillusionmcnt with the war.
World War I. The outbreak of World War I, or the "Great War," began with a territorial dispute between the vast empire of Austria-Hungary and the nation of Serbia. After the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, Serbian nationalists took on the cause of the South Slavs of the Austria-Hungarian empire, deciding that it was time for these people to be liberated.
