Although his larger-than-life legend goes beyond the confines of American literature, Ernest Hemingway ultimately endures because of his vivid stories and powerful novels. His groundbreaking prose style still startles: hard, spare, ironic, disillusioned, deceptively simple, but rich with implication.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, he came of age as America entered World War I. The U.S. military rejected him because of his bad eyesight, so the glory-hungry Hemingway joined the Italian Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was severely wounded. Later, haunting fashionable Parisian salons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and other "Lost Generation" expatriates in the 1920s, he drew on his wartime and post-war experiences for "In Our Time" (1925), "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929). The books' subjects were tough and bleak, but romantic; their language was unforgettable and utterly original. "Hemingway's words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook," said the novelist Ford Maddox Ford. "They live and shine, each in its place."

Hemingway spent the 1930s and 1940s as a celebrity novelist and adventurer. His expeditions to Africa and daring dispatches from the Spanish Civil War became the basis for tales like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). Hemingway moved to Cuba in 1939, where his fame increased, even as his writing deteriorated largely due to health problems and alcoholism. (Ultimately, he would commit suicide in 1961.) But in 1952, legendary LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was sent to the village of Cojimar, Cuba, to photograph "Papa." The pictures — which, in the end, were never published — were meant to accompany Hemingway’s last masterpiece, "The Old Man and the Sea," which LIFE ran in September of that year. The Nobel Prize-winning novella, a story of aging, adversity, and endurance, remains Hemingway’s most famous work. —Jeff Ousborne