Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and journalist born in 1899 who is considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, and other notable works include A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway had a distinctive writing style characterized by economy and understatement, featuring simple and declarative sentences.