Ernest Hemingway

“Nobel laureate, big-game hunter, marlin fisherman, and the mustache that wrote the short sentences.”

90STACH SCORE

✂ Chevron Historical Figure Era: 1930s Born 1899 🏆 HOF Inductee

Is this a Legendary Stach?

Stach Stats

Stash Power88

Ruggedness95

Curl Factor20

Legend Status98

Stats are for entertainment purposes. The mustache committee's decisions are final and occasionally arbitrary.

Style: Chevron
Peak Era: 1930s
Born: 1899
Hall of Fame: Inducted 2026
Fan Votes: 0 legendary · 0 meh

The Story

About Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose spare, direct prose reshaped twentieth-century literature. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he drove an ambulance on the Italian front in the First World War, worked as a foreign correspondent, and became a central figure of the expatriate literary scene in 1920s Paris. His major works include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

He was also one of the most famous sportsmen of his century. Hemingway hunted big game on safari in East Africa, experiences that fed Green Hills of Africa and some of his best-known stories, and he was a devoted deep-sea angler, chasing marlin and tuna from his boat Pilar off Key West, Bimini and Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea grew directly out of that life on the water.

In his younger years Hemingway wore a thick, dark mustache that became his trademark in photographs from Paris, Key West and Africa; later in life it was joined by the famous white beard. The mustache came first, and it was the look of Hemingway at his most adventurous.

The Verdict

Why the Stach Became Iconic

The young Hemingway mustache is a full, dark chevron worn over a grin that usually had a fishing rod, a rifle or a typewriter nearby. It is the mustache of the 1920s and 1930s adventurer-writer, and it appears in some of the most reproduced author photographs ever taken.

For this wing in particular, Hemingway is the outdoorsman's writer. Nobody else in the Hall put hunting and fishing at the center of a Nobel Prize-winning body of work, and nobody else's mustache has been photographed alongside quite so many marlin.

On the Record

Notable Moments

The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Green Hills of Africa (1935) — nonfiction account of an East African safari
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) — Pulitzer Prize, 1953
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1954

Fun Facts

His fishing boat, Pilar, is preserved at his former home outside Havana, Cuba.
He fished for marlin and giant tuna in the waters off Key West, Bimini and Cuba for much of his life.
His African safaris produced both nonfiction and some of his most celebrated short stories.
The white beard of his later years is famous, but the dark mustache came first and lasted for decades.