Here is a sample answer to the writing exercise of Ernest Hemingway's biography:
Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1899. He had a middle-class upbringing, as his father was a doctor. However all his life he rebelled against the morals of his parents and the conventions of life in Chicago.
He graduated from High School in 1917, but, being impatient for a less sheltered environment, he didn't go to college. Instead, he went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for a leading newspaper, "The Star", and this gave him invaluable vocational training.
He wanted to be soldier, but was rejected for military service because he had poor eyesight, so he became an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was injured in World War I, and also decorated for heroism.
He was fascinated by war, working as a war correspondent in Spain, China and Europe, and many of his books were about war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, his most succesful book, was written in 1940, and is about a volunteer American soldier in the Spanish Civil War. This book dealt with the comradeship of war, while A Farewell to Arms is about the pointlessness of war.
He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1954, but he suffered from depression towards the end of his life. He loved life, although he was obsessed with death, and he committed suicide in 1961.
