Ernest hemingway biography reviews

With “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography,” Mary V. Dearborn becomes the first woman to tackle a full-scale life of that hypermasculine writer.
A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer.
They describe it as a well-researched, insightful look into the life of Ernest Hemingway that provides new perspectives.

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New bio: Why we can't get enough of 'Papa' Hemingway

For somebody best known for writing books, Ernest Hemingway was as famous as any movie star, sports hero or rock idol you can name in the last century — or this one. That’s right. This one. It seems we still can’t stop talking about him even beyond the Millennium.

The April publication of Hemingway’s Brain, a forensic inquiry into the physical traumas that led to his suicide in 1961, is being followed by Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway (Knopf, 627 pp., *** out of four stars), the first full-fledged biography in 15 years.

It, too, is a kind of extended autopsy, not only of Hemingway’s life, but his reputations as a model of American virility and as an enduring literary figure. All of these were subject to intense scrutiny by scholars, journalists and skeptics even when Hemingway was a living, breathing Nobel Prize winner.

Though some may wonder whether at this late date we need 600-plus pages on one of the most written-about lives in literature, Dearborn’s contribution to the biographical corpus benefits from bringi

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

November 29, 2021

Mary Dearborn's Ernest Hemingway: A Biography represents a masterful & revealing profile of a highly gifted & exceedingly complex American literary figure, perhaps the 1st Hemingway biography by a woman, at least the 1st one I am aware of. This is a book I meant to skim while reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast but which quickly captured my interest in spite of its 600+ page length.

And curiously, it began with an amazingly well-conceived preface by the author, one in which Mary Dearborn managed to encapsulate so much of the Hemingway aura in a way that seemed quite insightful. As Dearborn puts it while reviewing his early life in Paris, "Everyone would be drawn to this young man--eager to be part of his energy field. He would be more curious than anyone you'd met & the life before him would take on the outlines of a great adventure."

Dearborn goes on to say that Hemingway became "a symbol of male potentiality, with the landscape he occupied gaining color & dimension & it seemed that the world did not s

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

One of this biography's achievements is to deepen our understanding of Hemingway's fraught relationship with his mother ... Dearborn captures Hemingway in all of his extremes, the story of a hugely flawed and endlessly compelling human being producing enduring art.

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Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother ... Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend ... Dearborn skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material; she is an indefatigable researcher. But I’m not an indefatigable reader, and her insistence on using every minute detail slows the momentum of Hemingway’s story ... Ultimately, the scale of Hemingway’s life is so colossal and his motives so convoluted that no biographer, however gifted, can neatly sever the legend from the life, or have the last word on its meaning.

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