Among the centenaries falling this year there's that of Ernest Hemingway, born at Oak Park (Illinois) in 1899.  
His books are known all over the world: from “The sun also rises” a “A farewell to arms”, “Death in the afternoon”, “Green hills of Africa”, “To have and have not”, “The first forty-nine stories”, “For whom the bell tolls”, “Across the river and into the trees”, “The old man and the sea”, till the posthumous, “”A moveable feast”, “Island in the stream”, “”The garden of Eden”. 
A day in October of 1918 Hemingway, by then, nineteen years old, wrote to his father this letter: “Dying is a very easy matter, I saw the death and I really know it. If I must have died it would have been very easy. Just the easiest thing I've ever done...and how much better it is to die in the happy period of the youth, yet not disappointed, to leave in a glow of light, instead of having the body wasted and old for the illusions astray “. 
Three months before, at Fossalta di Piave, Hemingway was torn to pieces at his leg by a mortar shell and by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was in the Italian front as volunteer of the American Red Cross.  
In the night of the wounding he stayed without aid on the earthen floor of an unroofed stable. He had a pistol with him and for the first time, feeling so much pain and seeing so much blood over him, the temptation of making suicide crossed his mind. 
So it seems to me that the topic of death, highlighted by the letter to the father in 1918, can be assumed as underlying never-endlessly in Hemingway's life.  
So to quote some examples, Hemingway reacting to the hated studies of violoncello, preferring to learn the art of the boxe.  
Hemingway sleeping outdoors in the woods, swimming naked in rivers and lakes, shooting to bears, leopards and lions, chasing the sword fish in the ocean. Hemingway who, in 1948, wrote to a friend: “I like making love, fighting, drinking, reading, fishing for, hunting, writing. I imagine that fight and drink are vices, but I like both either”. 

As a direct consequence of this portrait, it can be foreseen another remark.  
A so athletic personage, so vital and disdainful of danger, could have follow an idea of death as it was outlined in the thirties by the culture of Right.  
It would be enough the participation to the civil war in Spain in the ranks of the antifrancoists to deny this hypothesis, but there's more. Keenly, a biographer of Hemingway wrote: “In his endless sense of loneliness it was as if life haven't had a beginning for him but as it has been since ever and he played it, he did not live life but he temporarily played life “. 
 In this explanation there's even the latent play-acting of the writer, his inroads crossing Spain following the “troupes” of toreros, his intemperance as a drinker, his will to appear, time by time, as an adventurous protagonist of safaris, as a romantic lover, as an old sea dog. 
The truth is that Hemingway was not fully himself in any role, he was as a player always on the threshold of the farewell, conscious of his own ephemeral acting.  
So the idea of death is to refer to the undying vanity of things, to human fragility.  
That's why Hemingway liked the first verses of the Ecclesiaste: “ Generations come and go, but earth stands till for an indefinite time. The sun rises still, and the sun sets, going towards the place where it will rise again from... All things bore, and man does not lead to discuss it “. 
But these verses were not said at the Hemingway's funerals, hold at Ketchum, Idaho, on July 6th 1961.  
The writer made suicide four days before. The physical and psychological decay leading Hemingway to this last gesture had many phases: starting from the inklings of a depression due to the divorce from her first wife Hadley, throughout the notice about the suicide of his father in 1928, from the plane crash in Kenya where the writer was reported dead up to the terror for an non-existent poverty.  
He weighted 120 kilos, he faced destroying diets, and his pressure was always very high. In a clinic in Minnesota he underwent fifteen electroshocks. 

Already, in the thoughts of Hemingway, it left only the ghosts of the novels and tales that in 1954 made him winning the Nobel award for literature.  
There was no inspiration anymore, and it became impossible the adventure to write a book.  
Even ghosts seemed modelled over slow and nebulous images of death.  
As the fisher of the “The old and the sea “ towing over the waves the huge fish-bone of the sword fish and dreaming lazy, tawny and unreachable lions on the far shores of Africa.