Ernest Hemingway

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

"Brief biographies of already familiar, intensely studied figures sometimes shine new light on their subjects by discerning patterns and themes that may become lost amid more detailed accounts. This is certainly the case with Kale's superb Ernest Hemingway. . . . Contrary to Hemingway's hale and hearty public persona (over which he ultimately lost control), his life was essentially tragic--pitiful and heartbreaking, really--and through her conciseness Kale makes the reader feel this bitter truth with particular intensity. This is a sad book, even among studies of Hemingway. And a hard book to put down. . . . A welcome addition to the Critical Lives series, this short biography packs an incredible amount of information and insight into a small package and would be impossible to improve upon."-- "Cercles"
"Kale's Ernest Hemingway reminds us that succinctness offers its own formal pleasures by resisting digression and not spinning its wheels with undue elaboration. Given Hemingway's own celebrated devotion to concision, the format suits its subject. This biography is a happy reminder that brief can be beautiful."-- "Hemingway Review"
"Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway is a formidable counter argument to those who erroneously believe the Hemingway oeuvre is memoir masquerading as fiction."-- "PopMatters"

Author Bio

Verna Kale is Visiting Assistant Professor in Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia, and has contributed essays to the Hemingway Review. She is the editor of Teaching Hemingway and Gender (forthcoming).