At first glance it might seem a bit of cultural dissonance to refer to one of the most famous American authors by a term that only came into popularity some years after he died. Yet, in many ways, Hemingway's life and career was the template for so many to be called rock stars in the decades immediately following his death in 1961.

We've placed Hemingway high on our list of top 20 most famous American authors . He earned that rank on the strength of his contribution to English language literature. Yet, even with all that, there's no denying that his fame and its very nature superseded even that literary legacy. He made the mold for artistic celebrity that defined the 20th century.

He was only yet in his 20s when Hemingway received expansive critical accolades following the publication of his anguished and restless novella The Sun Also Rises. This was already pretty heady stuff for such a young man. Yet, only a few years after that he became a bestselling author, on the strength of his novel, A Farewell to Arms. Furthermore, he had yet further cemented his critical acclaim with two short story collections in the years just before and following Farewell. He was widely acknowledged as having reinvented the short story, with his moving, epiphany-inspired tales, that captured the tiny tragedies and lingering scars of life in tales such as A Day's Wait, A Clean and Well-Lighted Place and Hills Like White Elephants.

An infinitesimally small number of artists ever achieve such heights and even fewer in the first decade of adulthood. Many things contributed to this sensation that was the young Hemingway.

To begin with, reminiscent of many of the most successful rock artists who followed him in the later decades of the century - think of David Bowie, David Byrne and Madonna - Hemingway exhibited a remarkable capacity to draw valuable lessons from avant garde and experimental artists, while having a deep intuition about how to apply these lessons in ways that remained accessible to mainstream literary society. For Hemingway the important influences included Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He knew how to capture a lesson in narrative or language from the avant garde in a way that domesticated it for the mainstream.

And capture it, he did. In a manner strikingly resembling the way that rock and roll captured the rebellion and idealism of the educated and materially privileged baby boomers, Hemingway's fiction captured the existential disquiet of the post-WWI lost generation.

Meteoric success at a young age, though, poses its challenges: how does one repeat the feat? What do you do for an encore? He did have some modest "hits" in the 30s, capped off with the success of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. Perhaps not a work equal to what he'd accomplished previously, but it sold. The 40s dragged out though as long a decade in which Hemingway's publications became less and less impressive and relevant.

For all that, though, Hemingway never ceased to be a household name and a source of constant popular fascination. Further, not only was he aware of this aspect of his fame, but he seems to have taken no small effort in cultivating it. He nurtured relationships with influential gossip columnists and photographs of him hunting or fishing big game always had a way of finding their way into the glossy magazines of the period.

He appeared in commercial advertisements endorsing a number of consumer products. And he regularly submitted letters to literary and other publications in which he primped and primed the well sculpted image of the man's man and the anti-intellectual intellectual.

There certainly were those, even among his contemporaries, who claimed that Hemingway had grown a sad and tired parody of himself by the mid-point of the century. Again, it wouldn't be too overstretching an analogy to compare this perception of him as resembling the attitude today to 60s and 70s rock and pop bands, grey and flabby, that cash in on their past glories with nostalgia tours of casinos and community halls.

For Hemingway, though, at least artistically, the end wasn't quite that tragic. Almost like one of those hanging-on senior citizen rock bands, with the audacity to actually try out a new song, rather than pandering endlessly to the clamoring for greatest hits, who suddenly found themselves with a new platinum record.

Just when almost all critical and even commercial opinion seemed to be on the side that as a writer, Hemingway was over, he struck one more time, with an act of literary accomplishment that some still consider the greatest of his long career. Suddenly, in 1952, with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, taking the world of letters and literature by storm, Earnest Hemingway was artistically relevant once more. This resurgence in the autumn of his life was soon after rewarded with the Nobel Prize in literature, which finally cemented his legend.

Yet, in that tragic way in which Hemingway's work always told more about him than perhaps he realized, one can't help noting the theme of this last great novella. It tells the story of an elderly man who sees his last hope for greatness slip away out of his grasp. The moment of its apparent possession revealed as but a mirage. By the 50s, there was something tragically broken in the heart of Hemingway.

And of course he molded that template for 20th century artistic celebrity right to the end. Anticipating all the tragic rock star youths which would follow the path he'd beaten, in 1961, in an isolated home, Hemingway succumbed to his own misdoing, in a suicidal fog of depression and substance abuse. The world lost one of the most important artists of the 20th century. In the process, the template of artistic celebrity which Hemingway made, received its finishing touch. And it would be a mold, simultaneously triumphant and tragic that informed the aspirations of dreamy youth throughout the rest of the century.

And indeed still does.