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Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
Hemingway's first novel is set in high-living 1920s Paris, which he paints as a vacuum in which promiscuity and alcohol are the guiding lights. It is the tale of a group of American and British expatriates, the 'lost generation', who are drawn to a Spanish fiesta. There, the hero, Jake Barnes, who is impotent physically and empty spiritually, finds some meaning in life again when he witnesses the bullfights which pit man against beast, and life agaisnt death. Much admired by Jake is Pedro Romero, a young matador, characterized by his skill, courage and moral seriousness, who stands in complete contrast to the dissolute band of fun-seekers of which Jake is a part. (Kirkus UK)
