The Man Who Wasn't There: A Life of Ernest Hemingway

(Hardback)

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Description

Ernest Hemingway was an involuntary chameleon, who would shift seamlessly from a self-cultivated image of hero, aesthetic radical, and existential non-conformist to a figure made up at various points of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, narcissism and arbitrary vindictiveness. Richard Bradford shows that Hemingway's work is by parts erratic and unique because it was tied into these unpredictable, bizarre features of his personality. Impressionism and subjectivity always play some part in the making of literary works. Some authors try to subdue them while others treat them as the essentials of creativity but they endure as a ubiquitous element of all literature. They are the writer's private signature, their authorial fingerprint. In this ground-breaking and intensely revealing biography, which includes a complete reassessment of Hemingway's oeuvre Hemingway's unfixed personality is shown to be the index to why and how he wrote as he did.

Reviews

A blistering, rollicking, horribly convincing account of a compelling literary monster ... [a] fascinating book. * The Sunday Times *
In a new revisionist biography by Richard Bradford, we learn, from his astute analysis of previously unpublished letters from the Hemingway archive that there is indeed a good deal more to know about this scrapper intellectual, and role player. * The Irish Independent *

Author Bio

Richard Bradford is Research Professor in English at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon. He has published over thirty acclaimed books, including a biography of Philip Larkin, which was an Independent Book of the Year; the authorised biography of Alan Sillitoe; a life of Kingsley Amis; and a biography of Kingsleys son, Martin. He has written for the Spectator and the Sunday Times and has been interviewed on his work for various BBC Radio Arts programmes, as well as appearing on the Channel 4 series Writers in their Own Words. His The Importance of Elsewhere, on Larkin the photographer, inspired a BBC TV programme and, most recently, his biography Orwell was given five stars as an excellent new biography by The Telegraph.