Hemingway: The Final Years - Hardcover

Reynolds, Michael S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393047482 ISBN 13: 9780393047486

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Drawn from newly available letters, recently published memoirs, in-depth interviews, and previously classified documents, a dramatic portrait of the literary genius concentrates on Hemingway's last years in postwar America.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Reynolds is the author of The Young Hemingway (a National Book Award Finalist), The Paris Years, and Hemingway: The 1930s, all available from Norton.

From the Inside Flap

This rich and sympathetic portrayal of Hemingway's final years brings to life the man and the writer, courageous and foolish, an ardent lover and a sometimes infuriating husband, a representative man in the American grain. Hemingway's triumphs as a writer during the 1940s and 1950s accompanied a life of risk and danger. Michael Reynolds probes deeply into Hemingway's activities during the war years. He brings to light new information on Hemingway's counterintelligence operation in Havana, his submarine patrols, and his battlefield experiences during World War Two, beginning with riding a landing craft into the horror of Omaha Beach on D-Day. The postwar period was the most productive of Hemingway's writing life, when he authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea" and five posthumously published books, including "A Moveable Feast." It was during this time that he received the imprimatur of the Nobel Prize. Yet, even as he graced the cover of "Life" magazine, Hemingway's physical and mental health deteriorated while his public image continued to demand the strenuous life. In 1961 he committed suicide, leaving behind the stuff of which American myths are made. Using newly available letters, recently published memoirs, previously classified documents in the National Archives, and detailed interviews, Reynolds brings to these later years the sensitive eye of a biographer who has matured along with his subject, evocatively recreating Hemingway's life and the atmosphere of postwar America. The result is the fullest and most accurate account of Hemingway's final years.

Reviews

Covering the last two decades of Ernest Hemingways life, the fifth and concluding installment in this biography (which began with The Young Hemingway, 1986) unfolds, with quiet but steadily mounting tragic detail, depicting a writer whose legend swelled as his physical and psychic resources ebbed. In the 1940s, Hemingway wrote his Spanish Civil War epic, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and served as a WWII correspondent. A decade later, he reached the zenith of his reputation as he won the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and became a fixture on bestseller lists and college syllabi. He started an ambitious land-sea-air WWII trilogy that became transformed into posthumously published tales of artists mourning Paris as a lost Eden: Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, and A Moveable Feast. But though Hemingway continued to write some of his best material at peak periods, his body and spirit were now continually undermined by the need to live up to prior Byronic exploits. He fell increasingly into the embrace of the old whore Death by suffering several concussions during the war and two plane crashes on safari in Africa, then exacerbating the pain with excessive drinking. Reynolds mines recent memoirs and newly available Hemingway archives at the JFK Library to trace his subjects downward spiral, including growing tendencies toward paranoia and confusion of his fiction with reality. He is excellent in chronicling Papas dance of death with last wife Mary Welsh, in a relationship marked by sexual games, verbal abuse, embarrassing flirtations with other women, expensive peace offerings, and threats of suicide eventually made good. A distinguished, moving account of a creator who, through relentless self-discipline, lived long enough to report on the darkness inside himselfand all of us. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this final volume, Reynolds picks up Hemingway's career as the author is reviewing the typescript of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." What follows - Hemingway's last divorce, the last marriage, the last infatuations and humiliations of that marriage, the last two plane crashes, the last bullfight tour, the last electroshock treatments and the last vituperations - isn't pretty. Reynolds portrays an author who was 'becoming his fiction' and documents the accumulated tragedy of the life: 'There is no decorous retirement plan except failure for a writer.'

The concluding installment of Reynolds's (Hemingway: The Paris Years) three-volume life of Papa makes a fitting centennial tribute to one of the most influential American writers of the century. Here Reynolds chronicles Hemingway's life from 1940 to his suicide by shotgun in July 1961. Beginning with the writer's tumultuous third marriage to journalist Martha Gellhorn, Reynolds takes readers through the end of the Spanish Civil War, the great success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, WWII and Hemingway's self-exaggerated role in "liberating" Paris, the triumph of The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize and the author's slow but certain physical and mental decline. Readers have front-row seats for his stormy fourth and last marriage to Mary Welsh, a relationship marked by continual brawls and reconciliations, and we follow the couple through Europe and Africa, enduring the back-to-back helicopter crashes that left Hemingway physically battered and emotionally scarred. Touchingly, in his final years, Hemingway sought to return to the people and places of his past, only to confront the futility of doing so. Hemingway suffered from severe depression and increasing paranoia, Reynolds writes, and his decline was hastened by shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. Ultimately, he was unable to complete several ambitious projects, works eventually published as A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, The Dangerous Summer and, just out from Scribner, True at First Light. Recent scholarship and the release of important archival information make it clear that the demands placed on the celebrity Papa, a self-created and self-perpetuated myth, only hastened the end. As Reynolds concludes, Hemingway's story is one "the ancient Greeks would have recognized." (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Completing his celebrated five-volume study, Reynolds traces a dark change in Hemingway's later personality, while correcting the old wisdom that the writer was unable to work in his autumn years--which freshens the tragedy of his 1961 suicide. Barring further unpublished Papa novels, this may be the definitive biography of a troubled master. (LJ 5/1/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the final volume of his Hemingway biography (published on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth), Reynolds portrays the ultimately tragic writer at the pinnacle of his literary success and in the depths of despair. It's 1940 and For Whom the Bell Tolls is all the rage. Uneasy at the signs of impending war yet drawn inexorably into its maw, Hemingway travels over the next few years to both Asia and France. In researching these adventures, Reynolds gained access to previously unavailable materials and now reveals the full extent of Hemingway's secret war efforts: his intelligence work in China, participation in the French Resistance, and submarine patrols in the Caribbean at the helm of a converted fishing boat. A heroic man of action, a "strange attractor" in society, and a "son of a bitch in private," especially during his fourth marriage to the long-suffering Mary Walsh, Hemingway remained first and foremost a writer. As Reynolds chronicles the writing of books published during Hemingway's last two decades, such as The Old Man and the Sea, as well as several unfinished novels, including the soon-to-be-released True at First Light , he unveils the phenomenal creativity involved in Hemingway's transformation of autobiography into fiction. Although he won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, Hemingway lost the war with his private demons, and Reynolds' rapt readers will retain the haunting image of Hemingway trapped within his once hale, then battered and drug-and alcohol-poisoned body as the awesome firepower of his unique, epoch-defining mind slowly diminishes. Hemingway knew that all stories end eventually in death, and magnificent storyteller that he was, he carefully scripted his own, committing suicide at age 62 and leaving behind a mighty legacy. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393047482
• ISBN 13: 9780393047486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416