"His prose is of first distinction, " declared critic Edmund Wilson of Hemingway upon the  1923 publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems, the author's first foray into the literary world. These short stories ("Up in Michigan, " "Out of Season, " and "My Old Man") and their accompanying poems captured the attention of other influential critics as well, anticipating the future Nobel Laureate's emergence as a prominent voice of the Modernist movement. Succinct and lucid in his prose style, American novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) exercised an enormous influence over English-language authors of the twentieth century. A member of the expatriate Lost Generation circle, Hemingway cultivated a larger-than-life image of vigorous masculinity complemented by an intense sensitivity. He drew upon his adventures as a big-game hunter, bullfighter, and fisherman for his fiction as well as his service as a World War I ambulance driver and a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.