Ernest Hemingway books

Anthologies

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

The Last Interview Reading Order

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Reading Order

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. After working as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, where he was wounded on the Italian front. That wartime experience would shape much of his fiction, from the early stories in In Our Time to the Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

In the 1920s, Hemingway lived in Paris as part of the expatriate literary community that Gertrude Stein called “the Lost Generation.” His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), drew on his time among bullfighters and fellow expatriates in Spain and France. A Farewell to Arms followed in 1929, telling a love story set against the chaos of World War I. Both books established his reputation for clean, stripped-down prose that left as much unsaid as said.

Hemingway spent decades living between Key West, Cuba, and various parts of Africa and Europe. He was an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfighting enthusiast, and those passions show up throughout his work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize and helped secure his Nobel Prize two years later. Several books, including A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream, were published after his death in 1961 and have added to the full picture of his writing life.