Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961) enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world. Verna Kale's new, narrative portrait of Hemingway challenges some of the long-held assumptions about his life and craft, and re-examines the writer, sportsman and celebrity through the stages of his long and varied career.
The book traces Hemingway's adventures as a Red Cross volunteer in the First World War, his apprenticeship as an expatriate poet in 1920s Paris, his navigation of the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, his fraught relationships with his four wives - and with his own celebrity - and his decades-long, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to write a masterwork that would explode the boundaries of the American novel. Kale traces the writer's decline as Hemingway's strenuous life exacted a steep physical and mental toll that the battered 'Papa' was ultimately unable to pay.Wrestling with an unwieldy masterwork he hoped would upset the very conventions he had helped to shape, Hemingway struggled against his deteriorating health, the victim of a debilitating condition that contemporary medical research is only recently coming to understand.
