July Literary Birthdays

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
American novelist and short-story writer, July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois; his father, a doctor, took him on hunting and fishing trips in Michigan, the setting of Hemingway's first short stories. In World War I, he served first as an ambulance driver in Italy, then was seriously wounded while serving with the Italian army. In the early 1920s, he worked in Europe as a newspaper correspondent for the Toronto Star, where he met Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound in Paris; this time is chronicled in his memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964). Married four times, Hemingway ended his own life with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho.

The Torrents of Spring (1924)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
The Green Hills of Africa (1935)
The Fifth Column (1938)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1953)
Islands in the Stream (1970) was published after his death.

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Other Literary Birthdays

German-Swiss novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877)
Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska (1923)
Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883)
Tony-winning playwright Tom Stoppard (1937)
American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804)
Czech writer and poet of the Czech Realism school Jan Neruda (1834)
Croatian novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and playwright Miroslav Krleza (1893)
British neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933)
Canadian short story writer Alice Munro (1931)
NYC native literary critic Harold Bloom (1930)
Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda (1904)
Nigerian dramatist, poet, and novelist Wole Soyinka (1934)
Yiddish/Polish novelist and Nobelist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904)
British novelist and art historian Anita Brookner (1928)
American journalist Hunter S. Thompson (1937)
Rhode Island-born, Tennessee-raised novelist Cormac McCarthy (1933)
Chicago-born mystery writer and creator of Philip Marlowe Raymond Chandler (1888)
British poet and novelist Robert Graves (1895)
Bulgarian/British novelist and Nobelist Elias Canetti (1905)
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856)
British novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley (1894)
French political scientist and writer Alexis de Tocqueville (1905)
Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi (1919)