Ernest Miller Hemingway was one of the greatest American writers in the 20th-century, and his understated literary stylings have influenced writers for decades. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the  Nobel Prize in Literature  in 1954. He had published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Many of his works are considered classics of  American literature. From the beginning of his writing career, Hemingway's distinctive style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, his style is simple, direct, and unadorned, probably as a result of his early newspaper training. Hemingway was raised in  Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for  The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the  Italian front to enlist with the  World War  I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel  A Farewell to Arms. According to  A Farewell to Arms, although the book ends with a death and a stillbirth, the main character Frederic himself is nevertheless in a sense reborn, becoming a better, deeper person through his months-long involvement with his pregnant lover. In 1921, Hemingway married  Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign  and fell under the influence of the  modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community.  The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926. After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married  Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War  where he had been a journalist, and after which he wrote  For Whom the Bell Tolls. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a far cry from the kind of fiction with which Hemingway began. It is an ambitious work on a grand and epic scale, and it deals with war and politics directly in a way that is true of none of the other great Hemingway novels. Some readers found it a more conventional, less pathbreaking book than the best of Hemingway's earlier efforts, but others welcomed the undeniable i