The Young Hemingway

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 1, 1987

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.