The Young Hemingway
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A National Book Award Finalist
"The Young Hemingway will entertain and surprise…It should rank as one of the best nonfiction books of the year." —Los Angeles Times
Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway through World War I, where he was frustrated by being too far away from the action and glory, despite his being wounded and nursed to health by Agnes Von Kurowsky—the older woman with whom he fell terribly in love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hard upon the publication of other Hemingway biographies comes this pithy portrait, which examines the familial, cultural and literary forces that contributed to the shaping of the young Hemingway. Focusing on three years in the writer's life, 19191921, Reynolds presents in the form of contiguous narrative cycles the vital elements in the Hemingway background: his depressive and paranoid father; his high-minded and independent mother, from whom he struggled to free himself; the long summers by a lake where his first literary impulses found expression; his brief experience of war in Italy (later expanded into a heroic military career); his 15 months in violence-ridden Chicago; and the literary influences, chiefly Kipling, Sherwood Anderson and Conrad, who preceded his encounters with the great Moderns, Eliot, Pound, Stein et al. Above all, we see the legacy left him by the conservative "high ideals'' of small-town America, including Teddy Roosevelt's ideal of heroic action, which made him hell-bent for fame as it created many of his problems with women. Reynolds, who teaches at North Carolina State University, is the author of Hemingway's First War. Photos.
