Ernest Hemingway (Paperback)

Verna Kale

ISBN 10: 178023578X / ISBN 13: 9781780235783

Published by Reaktion Books, London, 2016

About this Item

Paperback. 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. A thoroughly researched, balanced new biography of author, journalist and adventurer Ernest Hemingway. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781780235783

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ernest Hemingway (Paperback)
• Publisher: Reaktion Books, London
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178023578X
• ISBN 13: 9781780235783
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Ernest Hemingway has enjoyed a rich legacy as the progenitor of modern fiction, as an outsized character in literary lore who wrote some of the most honest and moving accounts of the twentieth century, set against such grand backdrops as the bullrings of Spain, the savannahs of Africa, and the rivers and lakes of the American Midwest. In this portrait of the Nobel-prize winner, Verna Kale challenges many of the long-standing assumptions Hemingway’s legacy has created. Drawing on numerous sources, she reexamines him, offering a real-life portrait of the historical figure as he really was: a writer, a sportsman, and a celebrity with a long and turbulent career.
           
Kale follows Hemingway around the world and through his many roles—as a young Red Cross volunteer in World War I, as an expatriate poet in 1920s Paris, as a career novelist navigating the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, and as a seasoned but struggling writer still trying to draft his masterpiece. She takes readers through his four marriages, his joyous big game expeditions in Africa, and his struggles with celebrity and craft, especially his decades-long attempt at a novel that was supposed to blow open the boundaries of American fiction and upset the very conventions he helped to create. It is this final aspect of Hemingway’s life—Kale shows—that wreaked the greatest havoc on him, taking a steep physical and mental toll that was likely exacerbated by a medical condition that science is only beginning to understand.
           
Concise but insightful, this book offers an acute portrait of one of the most important figures of American arts and letters. 

About the Author

Verna Kale is associate editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and has contributed essays to the Hemingway Review. She is the editor of Teaching Hemingway and Gender.