Ernest Hemingway

To those who pity the bulls at a bull fight, I say the bull will fight for his life and he will die in battle, and that is how he would choose his death if he had a chance to choose. "In hot blood and not in some miserable slaughterhouse where he can't fight back". Decry the spectacle if you are so detached from nature that death and combat exist only on your television, but do not pity the bull, for a good death is all many of us hope to live for.

The writer of only ten novels, yet it still difficult for me to choose a favorite as I love them all. If pressed, I will say "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but I can recommend any to anyone with confidence. As someone who has seen war and therefore despises anything that trivializes it, literature that can accurately convey the full spectrum of humankind's capacity for violence and the idealism that often spurs it - and that are also not gratuitously sensationalist - are rare for me to have found, and to then have them stand the test of time as his have, incredible.

An author of numerous other articles and short stories, my very favorite work of his is "The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber" (which was intended for Esquire but published by Cosmopolitan in 1936) and before any readers of this short story call it misogynistic, let me point to this quote attributed to Papa for them to consider:
After his staff notified him that Ava Gardner had swum naked in his pool at Finca Vigia he remarked; "The water is not to be changed."

This was worship, not denigration of women. Women were strong, admirable, rightfully willful, often unfathomable and complex, who necessitated as much attention in search of wondrous ponder as any other thing in life worth pursuing.

So many authors owe so much to Hemingway, so little that has come after can be seen as having been influenced by him, there is already too much written in this vein for me to comment further. Hemingway showed me that good men fall in on both sides in conflicts, that being tough meant being dependable, and many more timeless lessons.