Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, and the centennial of his birth is being observed by a series of seminars in universities, by literary conferences devoted to his life and work, by public festivals, and by a great deal of media attention focusing as much on his mythic persona as on his great works of fiction.

These events in Florida, Idaho, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Illinois are matched by similar observations in Spain, Italy, France, Cuba, China, and Japan, testifying to the fact that Hemingway, the son of a modest small-town physician, rose to become a world figure, as much revered in other countries as in the United States.

Indeed, it might be said that for some portion of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway was the most famous person on Earth.

To some extent his stature in the public imagination has only increased since his death, a suicide interpreted as the culmination of his belief in taking responsibility for his own life, even the termination of it. No one has replaced Hemingway as the emblem of American rugged individualism, the kind of muscular sensitivity that Theodore Roosevelt embodied in the early years of the century.

No one has rivaled Hemingway in presenting a cultural image that conjoins the traditional masculine virtues of strength, integrity, and determination with a commitment to art, for his life exhibited an uncompromised devotion to literature, to the honesty of his craft, to the writing of a kind of fiction that captured the sensations of experience in prose that was simple, direct, unpretentious, and aesthetically elegant.

In some ways, it is Hemingway's style that has had the most influence on American life, for American newspapers and magazines in the last half of the century reflect the controlled and understated prose that Hemingway learned to write as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1917, a style that he utilized throughout his life in the best of his work.

Even television reporters in the United States speak a language that reflects Hemingway's sparse style, devoid of florid excesses and rhetorical flourishes. The elegance of Hemingway's prose derives from the specificity with which he describes the sensory nature of human experience.

Hemingway seldom used metaphors, comparing things to other things; his prose captures the essence of the thing itself, and it does so beautifully and precisely. This kind of writing gave rise to the minimalist movement in American fiction, to the work of Raymond Carver and Susan Minot and others who sustain the legacy of Hemingway's fictional prose.

His portrayal of the nature of modern life has also been influential, for he depicts a world of insensitivity and violence, of domestic conflict and brutal war among nations that takes its toll on the mental states of his major characters.

Indeed, central to his work is the theme of the psychological effects of violence, the consequences of personal and political greed for power and domination. Far from the macho image of Hemingway created in the popular press, the characters in his fiction have all been wounded in important ways, damaged physically and psychologically, and they are trying to find some structure to provide meaning and direction to their lives.

Hemingway and his wife Mary with Juanito Quintana (inspiration for the character Montoya in "The Sun Also Rises") at a bullfight in Valencia, Spain, July 1953

Jake Barnes is impotent in "The Sun Also Rises", and he cries in the night over his impossible love for Brett Ashley. Frederic Henry, in "A Farewell to Arms," has seen the devastation of war, and, at the time he tells the novel, he has lost the one woman he loved, Catherine Barkley, who died in childbirth in Switzerland.

In "For Whom the Bell Tolls" there is not only the national loss, the impending victory of the fascists in Spain, but there is personal loss as well, as Robert Jordan is about to die at the end of the novel just as he has found love with Maria.

In what is, in many ways, his most moving novel, "The Old Man and the Sea," Hemingway depicted an elderly Santiago engaged in a quest for dignity in old age, an extended fight with a marlin that the old man must win to prove to himself, one last time, that he is still a master of his craft.

In their struggles, in their losses, in the turmoil of their lives, these characters embody the tragic essence of modern life. Hemingway's reputation and influence will forever rest on an uneasy blending of the myth of his personal adventures with the artistic merit of his best fiction.

But it is as an artist that he deserves the attention of posterity. He was, without doubt, one of the finest prose stylists in English. He captured in stunning stories and novels the uncomfortable realities of his age and forced into public consciousness a realization of the brutalities of war.

Hemingway and his reflection in London at Dorchester Hotel, 1944

His stories of Nick Adams depict the adolescent agonies of a generation; his four major novels record for all time the emotional turmoil of modern life. At the close of his career, Hemingway showed in "The Old Man and the Sea" that even in the anguish of life there can be nobility in perseverance and dignity in devotion to performing a task well.

Whatever failings he had as a man, and there were many, as a writer he was sometimes nearly perfect. It is the integrity of his craft, a richness beyond legend, that will forever endure.