American writer Ernest Hemingway was BOTD in 1899. Born in Cicero, Illinois to an affluent middle-class family, he showed an early talent for writing, forgoing university to work as a reporter in Kansas City. Rejected for military service in World War One due to an eye defect, he became an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, working on the Austro-Italian front until he was wounded and later discharged. He relocated to Paris in the 1920s, working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. He met and befriended the key figures of the emerging Modernist artistic scene, notably Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, and published his first short story collection in 1924. He became a literary star with the 1926 publication of The Sun Also Rises, a bleak novella about the post-war Lost Generation adrift in France and Spain, followed by the stratospherically successful war drama A Farewell to Arms, which was filmed in 1932 starring Gary Cooper. After exploring bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon and game-hunting in Green Hills of Africa, he worked as a war correspondent during Spanish Civil War, becoming heavily involved in the Republicanist movement. His experiences inspired his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. An instant bestseller, it was filmed in 1944, again starring Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. After the war, he settled in Cuba, travelling extensively though Africa on hunting expeditions. His last significant work, 1952’s The Old Man and the Sea, won him the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Praised for his lean, unadorned and tersely masculine prose style, he matched this with a public persona of an aloof, hard-drinking man of action and compulsive womaniser. Returning to the United States in 1960, he settled in Idaho, and was hospitalised for alcoholism and depression. He shot himself in 1961, aged 61. Married four times, including to journalist Martha Gellhorn, he had three acknowledged children, an unknown number of bastards, and well-documented affairs with actresses Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth. Now considered one of the titans of 20th century literature, his sexuality has been debated endlessly since his death, with many biographers and academics pointing to the repressed homoeroticism in his work, and his highly performative masculinity as a mask for his (homo?)sexual anxieties.