13/10/2026
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Illinois, USA. From an early age, he loved reading, writing, hunting, fishing and spending time outdoors. He began his career as a journalist before becoming one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
During the First World War, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy. He was seriously wounded in 1918, an experience that exposed him to the brutality of war and the fragility of human life. These experiences later shaped his writing, where courage often meant facing suffering without pretending it did not exist.
Hemingway's defining problem was how to write honestly about life without hiding behind beautiful words. He developed a simple, direct style that allowed emotions to live beneath the surface. In novels like The Old Man and the Sea, he explored failure, dignity, courage and the struggle to keep going when the odds are against you.
He admired writers such as Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Sherwood Anderson. He also learned from his years as a journalist, where every sentence had to earn its place. Outside writing, he loved fishing, hunting, boxing, bullfighting and travelling. His adventures often gave him the material for his stories.
The hardest lesson of Hemingway's life was that courage in public does not always mean peace in private. Despite his literary success, he struggled with serious personal difficulties and declining health in his later years. He died in 1961, leaving behind a body of work that continues to influence writers around the world.
One of his most famous lines comes from A Farewell to Arms:
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Hemingway's life reminds us that courage is not about being untouched by hardship. It is about facing what life brings without surrendering your dignity. And sometimes, the strongest people are those who have learned how to keep moving despite the things they cannot repair.
