Ernest Hemingway

An item at American Writers Museum

In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), a bullfighting fan defines aficionado as someone who is passionate in his interests. The term could also apply to Hemingway, who wrote brilliant, understated short stories and novels about sportsmen and soldiers: A Farewell to Arms (1929), "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936), and the subtly autobiographical The Old Man and the Sea (1952) among them.

As he observed in Green Hills of Africa (1935), "Write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel the fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way,"

AMERICAN VOICES

An exhibit at American Writers Museum

American writing is distinctive, diverse, and comes in many forms from across the nation. The 100 authors featured here represent the evolution of American writing. Learn more about each writer on the timeline by turning the panels below their portraits. Explore centuries of writing by pulling, turning, and touching the interactive elements on the counter.

This is not meant to be a list of the greatest or most influential writers. Instead, we present authors and works as part of the American story as it grows and changes. Taken together, this rich literary heritage reflects America in all of its complexity: its energy, hope, conflict, disillusionment, and creativity.

American Writers Museum