Hemingway: The Final Years - Softcover

Michael S. Reynolds

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320472 ISBN 13: 9780393320473

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

Hemingway's triumphs as a writer during the 1940s and 1950s accompanied a life of risk and danger.

Michael Reynolds discovered the truth about Hemingway's activities during the war years, which included running a counterintelligence operation in Havana. The postwar period was the most productive of Hemingway's writing life, when he authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea and received the Nobel Prize. Even as Hemingway graced the cover of Life magazine, his physical and mental health deteriorated while his public image as hunter and sportsman continued to demand the strenuous life. In 1961 he committed suicide, leaving behind the stuff of which American myths are made.

About this title

Review:

If one had to choose just one of Michael Reynolds's five volumes on Hemingway, The Final Years would probably be the best choice. Beginning with the fanfare surrounding the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the eve of the Second World War and ending with Hemingway's suicide in 1961, the book puts all that had come before into perspective even as it probes these last two decades of its subject's life. The amount of detail is staggering--and sometimes, particularly in the case of his troubled fourth marriage to Mary Welsh, painfully discomfiting. (Long before Mary interrupts a conversation between Hem and Lauren Bacall to show Bacall a bullet she keeps for anybody who makes a move on her husband, the reader has figured out that the marriage was not exactly happy.)

The sections on Hemingway's wartime exploits, both in Cuba as a volunteer U-boat hunter and in Europe as a correspondent, are fascinating. But even in these moments--hell, even when he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel--Hemingway was subject to what he called "black ass" bouts of depression, an inherited condition that (as Reynolds notes) wasn't helped by his drinking or his tendency to put himself into dangerous situations in which he could suffer yet another severe concussion. Reynolds has traced the great writer's psychological decline so thoroughly that, when Hemingway puts the shotgun in his mouth in the final chapter, it is not as if the expected conclusion has finally arrived; rather, the reader has been made to feel an even deeper sense of the inevitability of the act. --Ron Hogan

From the Inside Flap:

This rich and sympathetic portrayal of Hemingway's final years brings to life the man and the writer, courageous and foolish, an ardent lover and a sometimes infuriating husband, a representative man in the American grain. Hemingway's triumphs as a writer during the 1940s and 1950s accompanied a life of risk and danger. Michael Reynolds probes deeply into Hemingway's activities during the war years. He brings to light new information on Hemingway's counterintelligence operation in Havana, his submarine patrols, and his battlefield experiences during World War Two, beginning with riding a landing craft into the horror of Omaha Beach on D-Day. The postwar period was the most productive of Hemingway's writing life, when he authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea" and five posthumously published books, including "A Moveable Feast." It was during this time that he received the imprimatur of the Nobel Prize. Yet, even as he graced the cover of "Life" magazine, Hemingway's physical and mental health deteriorated while his public image continued to demand the strenuous life. In 1961 he committed suicide, leaving behind the stuff of which American myths are made. Using newly available letters, recently published memoirs, previously classified documents in the National Archives, and detailed interviews, Reynolds brings to these later years the sensitive eye of a biographer who has matured along with his subject, evocatively recreating Hemingway's life and the atmosphere of postwar America. The result is the fullest and most accurate account of Hemingway's final years.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393320472
• ISBN 13: 9780393320473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420