Ernest Hemingway will always be associated with the dynamic group of artists known as the "modernists" whose ideas set the European continent on fire in the first decades of this century. These artists came from many countries, and many of them, like Hemingway, honed their art and thought in Paris in the 1920s.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. By all accounts, he enjoyed a secure and unexceptional youth. His first taste of Europe came, at the age of eighteen (1918), when he volunteered to drive an ambulance in Italy during World War I (1914-1918, known as the "Great War"). He was wounded in Italy, and once he had recovered, he returned to the U.S.

He began his writing career as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, but soon interested himself in fiction. He befriended the writer Sherwood Anderson, who...