Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. He was the second child and eldest son of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and his wife, Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and spent summers with his family at their cottage on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan, an area he later used as the setting for many of his short stories. After graduating from high school in 1917, Hemingway took a junior reporting position at the Kansas City Star, one of the leading American newspapers of the day. The military repeatedly rejected Hemingway because he had a defective eye, but he managed to join the war effort in World War I as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was injured on the Austrian-Italian front. While hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. He proposed to her, but she rejected his offer, and it is likely that his tumultuous relationship with von Kurowsky formed the basis for one of his most popular and acclaimed novels, A Farewell to Arms. ...