Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961) wrote in a clear, spare, deceptively simple style that made him one of the most admired and imitated authors of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, he traveled widely throughout his life, living in Italy, France, Spain, and Cuba, and reporting from the frontlines of World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. His best-known novels are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. A year later Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Abraham Verghese (foreword) is the author of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestselling novels The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone, and the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. In 2016 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.