Hemingway: The 1930s Book

If Paris and Spain in the '20s provided the scene for Ernest Hemingway's writing apprenticeship, it was the decade that followed that saw the writer mature to the height of his powers, as told in the third volume of Michael Reynolds's five-part biography of the American writer. It was also the time that marked the creation of the "Hemingway myth," the burden and eventual doom of his later years. Hemingway "the great white hunter," "the boozing brawler," "the literary pugilist" began to take shape during his 30s, and the brilliance of his mature work carries within it the inevitable ripeness of decline and self-parody. (His friends would comment on the "long white whiskers" that Hemingway would metaphorically assume when talking about art, life, and literature, even as a young man.) Reynolds stretches his timeline back to 1929 to cover both the publication of A Farewell to Arms and the stock market crash. The next 10 years saw the publication of many of his major novels and some of the finest short stories, as well as such "nonfiction" as Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, and the collected pieces of war correspondence that would serve as source material for For Whom the Bell Tolls. The writer, increasingly celebrated and successful, made new friends, quarreled with old ones (including John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson), and met and fell in love with the glamorous Martha Gellhorn--the writer with whom he covered the Spanish Civil War and later married. As with his other biographies of Hemingway, Reynolds balances a clear enthusiasm for his subject with a keenly honed critical sense, chronicling not only the triumphs but also the ruthless nature of the writer's ambition to achieve them. He is particularly good at tracing how his subject's experiences--from fishing with friends off Key West to the African veldt to the battlefields of Spain--were translated into his fiction, through Hemingway's uncompromising effort to "put a thousand intangibles into a sentence." --John Longenbaugh Read More