Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world. This 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 Hemingways 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 ction 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.
Verna Kale traces the writers decline as Hemingways strenuous life exacted a steep physical and mental toll that the battered Papa was ultimately unable to pay. Wrestling with an unwieldy masterwork he hoped would upset the very conventions he had helped to shape, Hemingway struggled against his deteriorating health, the victim of a debilitating condition that contemporary medical research is only recently coming to understand.