Born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park Illinois in 1899, Ernest Hemingway left home at seventeen to become a reporter for the Kansas City Star, then served as a Red Cross volunteer on the Italian front, where he suffered shrapnel wounds. He moved to Paris in 1921 and became part of an international expatriate scene that included Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Among his numerous books are In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway took his life in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961.

Robert W. Trogdon is Chair of the English Department at Kent State University and a leading scholar of 20th Century American Literature and textual editing. He has published extensively on the works of Ernest Hemingway. He serves as an editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway.