Almost Hemingway
The Adventures of Negley Farson, Foreign Correspondent
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- USD 23.99
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- USD 23.99
Descripción editorial
Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway’s who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway’s in ways that compelled writers for publications as divergent as the Guardian and Field & Stream to compare them. Unlike Hemingway, however, Farson has been forgotten.
This high-flying and literate biography recovers Farson’s life in its multifaceted details, from his time as an arms dealer to Czarist Russia during World War I, to his firsthand reporting on Hitler and Mussolini, to his assignment in India, where he broke the news of Gandhi’s arrest by the British, to his excursion to Kenya a few years before the Mau Mau Uprising. Farson also found the time to publish an autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, which made him an international publishing sensation in 1936, as well as Going Fishing, one of the most enduring of all outdoors books.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Lost Generation whose art competed with a public image grander than reality, once confessed that while he had to rely on his imagination, Farson could simply draw from his own event-filled life. Almost Hemingway is the definitive window on that remarkable story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adventurer and foreign correspondent Negley Farson (1890–1960) remains something of a mystery in the bustling debut biography from former Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters Bowman and Santos. Born "among the tall pines in Plainfield, New Jersey," Farson out-traveled, out-fished, and out-drank Hemingway, the authors write, though his fiction has largely been forgotten. As a reporter, he was on the scene during many of the 20th century's turning points: he saw Lenin speak to vast crowds in Russia, was the only American correspondent to cover the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, and was in London during the Blitz. Yet his alcoholism destroyed his career, and he may have lacked the interiority needed for his work to live on: "There was no impulse to derive meaning or lessons from his adventures; the adventure was both the path and the destination, and it was enough." Bowman and Santos acknowledge that aspects of Farson's life remain murky—"He managed to hide the very deepest parts of himself.... What drove him, over and over, to such alcoholic depths?"—which unfortunately will leave readers wishing for answers as to what made him tick. But fans of the Lost Generation will be entertained by this rip-roaring account of a larger-than-life character mostly lost to history.
