About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherReaktion Books, The Limited

ISBN-10178023578X

ISBN-139781780235783

eBay Product ID (ePID)12038631911

Product Key Features

Book TitleErnest Hemingway

Number of Pages224 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicLiterary, American / General

Publication Year2016

IllustratorYes

GenreLiterary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography

AuthorVerna Kale

Book SeriesCritical Lives Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight13 Oz

Item Length7.7 in

Item Width5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Dewey Edition23

ReviewsSifting out the larger-than-life Hemingway in search of a faithful history of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Kale uses Hemingway's life to illuminate his writings, examining them within the context of his critics., A beautifully researched and critically balanced biography that covers Hemingway's life, works, and the array of critical response to both with exceptional thoroughness and exacting subtlety. Kale delivers a fresh, contemporary statement on a subject too long blurred by unexamined bias. A must-own volume for serious readers, students, and anyone interested in Hemingway and the complex relationships amongst his life, works, and twentieth-century American culture., Brief biographies of already familiar, intensely studied figures sometimes shine new light on their subjects by discerning patterns and themes that may become lost amid more detailed accounts. This is certainly the case with Kale's superb Ernest Hemingway . . . . Contrary to Hemingway's hale and hearty public persona (over which he ultimately lost control), his life was essentially tragic--pitiful and heartbreaking, really--and through her conciseness Kale makes the reader feel this bitter truth with particular intensity. This is a sad book, even among studies of Hemingway. And a hard book to put down. . . . A welcome addition to the Critical Lives series, this short biography packs an incredible amount of information and insight into a small package and would be impossible to improve upon., Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway is a formidable counter argument to those who erroneously believe the Hemingway oeuvre is memoir masquerading as fiction., Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway is a formidable counter argument to those who erroneously believe the Hemingway oeuvre is memoir masquerading as fiction., Kale's Ernest Hemingway reminds us that succinctness offers its own formal pleasures by resisting digression and not spinning its wheels with undue elaboration. Given Hemingway's own celebrated devotion to concision, the format suits its subject. This biography is a happy reminder that brief can be beautiful.

Dewey Decimal813.52

Table Of ContentNote on the Text Prologue 1. The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, 1899-1919 2. The Age Demanded, 1919-22 3. In Another Country, 1922-5 4. The End of Something, 1925-6 5. The Light of the World, 1926-9 6. Shootism versus Sport, 1929-35 7. The Soul of Spain, 1935-9 8. Notes on the Next War, 1939-44 9. The Battler, 1944-7 10. The Tradesman's Return, 1947-51 11. The Undefeated, 1951-4 12. The Last Good Country, 1954-61 L'Envoi References Further Reading Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgments

SynopsisErnest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961) enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world. Verna Kale's new, 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 Hemingway's 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 fiction 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., Ernest Hemingway has enjoyed a rich legacy as the progenitor of modern fiction, as an outsized character in literary lore who wrote some of the most honest and moving accounts of the twentieth century, set against such grand backdrops as the bullrings of Spain, the savannahs of Africa, and the rivers and lakes of the American Midwest. In this portrait of the Nobel-prize winner, Verna Kale challenges many of the long-standing assumptions Hemingway's legacy has created. Drawing on numerous sources, she reexamines him, offering a real-life portrait of the historical figure as he really was: a writer, a sportsman, and a celebrity with a long and turbulent career. Kale follows Hemingway around the world and through his many roles--as a young Red Cross volunteer in World War I, as an expatriate poet in 1920s Paris, as a career novelist navigating the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, and as a seasoned but struggling writer still trying to draft his masterpiece. She takes readers through his four marriages, his joyous big game expeditions in Africa, and his struggles with celebrity and craft, especially his decades-long attempt at a novel that was supposed to blow open the boundaries of American fiction and upset the very conventions he helped to create. It is this final aspect of Hemingway's life--Kale shows--that wreaked the greatest havoc on him, taking a steep physical and mental toll that was likely exacerbated by a medical condition that science is only beginning to understand. Concise but insightful, this book offers an acute portrait of one of the most important figures of American arts and letters.

LC Classification NumberPS3515.E37