American biographer and author, Mary Dearborn, turned out a masterful biography on Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, short story writer, beginning with the launching of his celebrated writing career as a young precocious reporter for the Kansas City Star (including foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star) through winning a Pulitzer Prize (1953) not long before his suicide, killing himself with his favorite shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Tragically, ending his life the same way his father did.
In between some of his greatest novels, "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," we learn Hemingway developed a writing style all his own: direct, simple, clear, and natural, all tools of the trade he learned as a young journalist.
We also learn away from the typewriter, Hemingway was as volcanic as his writing about shark attacks in the "Old Man and the Sea." When he died, he was on his fourth wife, he was abusive to them all, unfaithful to be sure, and a walking time bomb to those who surrounded him. As he got older, his health failed him more and more, attributable mostly to soaking his brain with excessive amounts of alcohol, compounding his manic-depressive state.
He was a harsh critic of his peers as well, directing poisoned arrows on the works of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (once his drinking companion) and Gertrude Stein.
But through it all, Dearborn cleverly shows how Hemingway in his prime was a prodigious novelist, who wrote with such clarity and precision about topics near and dear to his heart, namely, bull fighting, African safaris, the ravages of war, and fishing in the sea, among others.
Hemingway once told a young writer, “never write about a subject he didn’t know inside and out.”
As evidence of “Papa’s” rich body of work, this American literary giant knew the inner-workings of great many subjects.
--Bill Lucey
November 13, 2017
