Ernest Hemingway turned 18 a little more than 100 years ago — on July 21, 1917 — newly graduated from high school and uncertain about where to go from there. He opted for journalism and a job at The Kansas City Star that lasted just over six months but left a profound imprint.

Steve Paul, a longtime writer and editor at The Star, examines this transformative time in the iconic writer’s life in a discussion of his new book Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend. Hemingway would go from The Star to service as an ambulance driver in World War I, sustaining serious shrapnel wounds two weeks before turning 19. A once “modest, rather shy and diffident boy” grew in a year into a young man increasingly occupied by recording the truth as he saw it.