Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. He served in World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front; he was wounded and decorated. After the war, he worked as a journalist before settling in Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, who shaped his literary voice. His prose was terse, his sentences short, and his stories of men and their battles with nature, with love, with their own souls. Hemingway wrote many novels and short stories: "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and "The Old Man and the Sea," for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He lived in Key West, Cuba, and Idaho, always in pursuit of the perfect sentence, the true experience.

He married four times, loved deeply, and fought hard against his inner demons. Hemingway's life was marked by adventure, war, hunting, fishing, and an unyielding quest for authenticity. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, he ended his life with a shotgun. His works endure, capturing the essence of a man facing the world, striving for grace under pressure.

Frank Marcopolos lives in Florida with his dog, Sparky.