Getty Images: Theisen, Earl
Ernest Hemingway working at a portable table while on a big game hunt in Kenya, 1952.
The Ernest Hemingway style that has inspired look-alike contests and clothing brands is not the Hemingway of Paris in the 1920s, where he hung out with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as a fresh-faced literary novice working as a journalist for the Toronto Star. Born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, the Nobel Literature and Pulitzer Prize–winning man of later years, who sailed the Caribbean seas and safaried in Africa, will long be remembered for the rugged charm of his craggy beard, full of character and mirrored by a muscular writing style that was direct but with hidden depths. A steely fisherman and hunter, Hemingway naturally took to wearing Aran sweaters and utility wear: a hipster uniform that invigorates twenty-first-century menswear with a sturdy reliability. His novels today similarly endure: The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls are strong and classic, just like his heavy-duty facial hair.