- In 1918 Ernest Hemingway failed a vision test to become a soldier, and instead volunteered for ambulance service on the Italian front, where he was wounded and twice decorated. Recuperating in Milan, he fell in love with an American nurse, and his experiences became the basis for this novel, which Vita Sackville-West called a most beautiful, moving and human book. Writing in a terse, stripped-down style, first as a reporter and then a novelist, Hemingway was an enormously influential author from the 1920s through the 50s, and won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all acknowledged their indebtedness to him, as did non-authors like artist Edward Hopper, whose Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired in part by Hemingway"s short stories.