Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, to Clarence and Grace Heming-way. His father was a doctor and his mother a musician who had given up her career to care for the couple's six children.

Hemingway's early life was an upper-middle class, comfortable existence. He and his family spent summers at their cottage in northern Michi-gan. He graduated from high school and went to work as a reporter, a career he continued on and off for the rest of his life.

The comfortable life ended, however, in 1918, when Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver to do service on the front lines of World War I in Europe. While in Italy, just before his nineteenth birthday, he was severely wounded while helping to rescue another wounded man. The experiences that Hemingway had in the war and during his recuperation stayed with him...