Introduction

This short story was written by the author Ernest Miller Hemingway. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, and died on July 2, 1961. He was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, in the USA. After high school he worked for a short time as a reporter for the newspaper the Kansas City Star, leaving in 1918 to become an ambulance driver during World War One, from where he returned home seriously wounded in early 1919. In 1921, with his first wife, he went to Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, becoming part of the ‘Lost Generation’ expatriate community in Paris. He went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War and during World War Two he reported on the Normandy landings in 1944 and the liberation of Paris in 1945. When Hemingway was in his early 20s he dreamed of writing fiction, so journalism was primarily a day job, while he awaited his chance as a writer of fiction. He became one of the most prominent American authors of the 20th century, publishing seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Although he often stayed in Europe, his permanent residence was in Florida in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1959 he moved to Idaho, where he committed suicide in 1961.