Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

He fished the deep sea off the coast of Cuba, he hunted big game in Africa and Idaho, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona, he reported on the civil war in Spain and World War II in Europe. He was a dynamic, handsome man. He hobnobbed with movie stars like Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, and Ava Gardner. He brawled, he drank, he womanized. For four decades he also wrote some of the most popular and critically successful novels in modern American literature, from The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms in the 1920s to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. And his suicide in 1961 made international front-page news, for by then the world adventurer Ernest Hemingway had become the most famous American author of the twentieth century. Warfare, boxing, bullfights, fishing, art, good food, bad men, unhappy relationships, love—you can find the man’s interests everywhere reflected in his work. Yet ultimately nothing mattered more to Hemingway than the work, which this volume both celebrates and documents with photographs and a fascinating assortment of excerpts from letters, interviews, news reports, essays, speeches, book reviews, and manuscripts. Facsimiles of Hemingway’s works in progress demonstrate how he worked, while reprints of his commentary on his own fiction as well as that of other writers further illuminate the mind and methods that produced such modern classics as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Men Without Women. Generously illustrated and meticulously compiled, this volume of literary biography offers a wide variety of resources by which to view anew Hemingway’s life and work.