Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

Ernest Hemingway was a journalist before he was a novelist. He learned to cut. He learned that the reader fills in what the writer leaves out — and fills it in with something more powerful than anything the writer could have put there.

His sentences are terse. They do not explain. A man and a woman sit at a table. They order drinks. They talk about something that is not what they are talking about. You know what they are talking about. He never says it.

This is the iceberg theory: the story works because of what is below the surface. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. He learned it watching the bullfights in Spain and the wars in Italy and the losses he did not write about.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1954. The prize committee called his style "laconic." He would have approved of the word.

He gave no Nobel Lecture and was not at the banquet. The American ambassador read his short speech (1954), which begins: "Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory…" A laconic man, to the end. Read it at NobelPrize.org.