Ernest Hemingway

Wounded by mortar fire on the Italian front at eighteen, he fell in love with the nurse who cared for him; she broke off the engagement, and the wound became The Sun Also Rises's wound, a mark of loss running under the swagger. In Paris he apprenticed himself to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, cutting his prose down to bone.

Four marriages, big-game safaris, deep-sea fishing, bullfights, two wars reported from the front lines, two plane crashes survived in Africa within a single week in 1954: the life became as mythologized as the work, and that year's Nobel Prize crowned both at once.

His father had died by suicide in 1928; depression, alcoholism, and electroshock treatment closed in on Hemingway too, and in 1961 he shot himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.