Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and journalist whose spare, declarative prose — in The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea — reshaped twentieth-century fiction and won him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent much of the 1930s in Key West, where the boat captains and fishing guides he drank and worked with supplied him with a steady stock of local turns of phrase. This particular joke was one of them: Hemingway repeated it for over a decade, in letters and in conversation, but he consistently presented it as someone else’s line rather than his own.