Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences

He was the man who had all the credentials, who witnessed the time - the people, the names that were being elevated into history." In this brilliant new biography of Ernest Hemingway, award-winning author James R. Mellow offers a thorough reassessment of a man who was both a literary giant and an icon for his age. Through painstaking research and the use of new material, Mellow reveals aspects of the writer's life unexplored by previous biographers, corrects the record on important matters of chronology and fact, and explodes many of the myths Hemingway carefully constructed around his life.
Legendary Writer, peerless war correspondent, avid sportsman - and a suicide at the age of sixty-one - Hemingway lived a life profound in its accomplishments and tragic in its personal implications. From the salons of Paris to the corridas of Spain, from the revolutions in Cuba to a near-fatal safari in the African bush country, he both recorded and helped shape an era of unparalleled artistic achievement and untoward violence.
The cast of characters in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences includes the famous and the infamous of the times: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald - as well as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Georges Clemenceau. Mellow explores Hemingway's wary negotiations with the politics of the period and describes his journalism in unprecedented detail, reconstructing the writer's youthful interviews with world powers and placing him among America's greatest journalists.
Here too is an entirely new perspective on Hemingway's private life. On her marriage to Hemingway in 1921, Hadley Richardson tellingly referred to her husband's disappointed men friends as a "heart-busted bunch." Demanding, bawdy, affectionate, mercurial, Hemingway early on established a pattern for male companionship - a need to dominate, a need for approval, a dependence on older men as confidants - that endured throughout his life and reverberated in his fiction. Mellow investigates the profound personal and artistic implications of the writer's friendships with men, bringing provocative insight to a complex subject.
The final volume in James Mellow's "Lost Generation" trilogy, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences is, as well as an homage to Paris in the 1920s, a rumination on the art of biography, and a lyrical tribute to the writers and artists who set the indelible standards for the modern age.