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Hemingway: A Life in Pictures
Packed with over 350 images, granddaughter Hemingway shares her family albums with readers, giving additional insight into the iconic author. Beginning with a copy of his birth certificate, Hemingway aficionado Vejdovsky takes readers on a guided tour of the literary legend's life and career via this remarkable collection of candid snapshots. Those familiar with the writer's life and career probably will not find much new here, but images of a young Hemingway dressed as a girl and a copy of an article that appeared in his hometown paper that praised his bravery in combat during WWI for wounds he never received are just a few of the artifacts included. Love letters, edited manuscripts, and shots of Hemingway at bullfights and on hunting expeditions add credence to the legendary tales he spun of his exploits. Arranged chronologically, readers are able to walk through the writer's life, gaining greater insight into Ernest Hemingway as a man as well as a writer. Images of Hemingway fishing, reading to his infant son and recuperating from a plane crash in the 50s humanize him in ways a traditional biography cannot. (Publishers Weekly)
- GenresNonfictionPhotography
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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November 23, 2024
W tym pięknym, eleganckim albumie, tworzonym we współpracy z rodziną Hemingwaya, autorzy podkreślają zarówno zapomniane rozdziały życia pisarza, jak i te poprzednio wygaszone, przyćmione. Publikacja zdaje się mieć serce na dłoni, subtelnie spisana miłością, bezbronnością i prawdą.
Od kiedy to w klasie maturalnej skoczyłam w temat Ernesta Hemingwaya z otwartym sercem i rozbudzonym umysłem, niczym nurek w morskie odmęty, nieprzerwanie przeżywam cudowną przygodę, odnajduję połączenie i bezpieczne miejsce w świecie, który nie przestał się chwiać, ale również podejmuję próbę balansowania i brania za siebie odpowiedzialności w pasji ogniskującej się wobec dawno pożegnanego, skomplikowanego, naruszonego człowieka. Nigdy nie było to proste zadanie, zawsze terytorium z granicami, których boję się naruszyć, zauroczenie połączone z niepewnością i wymagające trzeźwego umysłu; Hemingway: A Life in Pictures stanowi świetną odpowiedź na wszystkie moje wahania i refleksje. Album tworzony we współpracy z wnuczką pisarza nie tylko zasypuje nas przepięknymi, poruszającymi, publicznymi i bardziej prywatnymi zdjęciami Ernesta (również tymi autorstwa niezapomnianego Roberta Capy). W podziale ze względu na różne sfery pisarza autorzy zwracają uwagę na zjawiska, wydarzenia i uczucia pisarza, które zazwyczaj są spychane na bok, przemilczane, pominięte w wielkiej gonitwie jego biografii. Ogromna waga położona jest na portrecie twórcy jako osoby, która nie mogła pozbyć się swojej własnej legendy w świecie publicznym; z jednej strony Hemingway sam ją rozwijał i jej łaknął, z drugiej miała na niego destrukcyjny wpływ, przesłaniała wszystko to, co naprawdę i z wielką intensywnością działo się w jego sercu. Osoby pracujące nad publikacją świetnie i z pełnym szacunkiem ukazały to, jak niejednoznaczną, nierzadko cierpiącą, przeżywającą wątpliwości, lecz niewiarygodnie zdeterminowaną osobą był Hemingway; zaadresowały to, jak przebijał się przez fikcję i jak jego twórczość portretowała samego autora. Album rozszerzył moją perspektywę; oddał to, co równocześnie wprawia mnie w wątpliwość, jak i sprawia, że tym bardziej mi zależy. Choć może pozostawać to niezrozumiałe.
W przypadku osoby tak obłożonej legendami i ostrymi osądami jak Ernest Hemingway, wyjątkowo ważne są takie publikacje jak Hemingway: A Life in Pictures. Pięknie prześwitują przez nią jego jasność i cienie, w których zdarzało mu się odnaleźć schronienie. Wiem, że nie chciał on natłoku biografii swojej osoby, ale tak się cieszę, że opowieści o nim przetrwały.
PS. To jest niepoważne, ile soft nudes Ernesta Hemingwaya widziałam w swoim życiu.
Od kiedy to w klasie maturalnej skoczyłam w temat Ernesta Hemingwaya z otwartym sercem i rozbudzonym umysłem, niczym nurek w morskie odmęty, nieprzerwanie przeżywam cudowną przygodę, odnajduję połączenie i bezpieczne miejsce w świecie, który nie przestał się chwiać, ale również podejmuję próbę balansowania i brania za siebie odpowiedzialności w pasji ogniskującej się wobec dawno pożegnanego, skomplikowanego, naruszonego człowieka. Nigdy nie było to proste zadanie, zawsze terytorium z granicami, których boję się naruszyć, zauroczenie połączone z niepewnością i wymagające trzeźwego umysłu; Hemingway: A Life in Pictures stanowi świetną odpowiedź na wszystkie moje wahania i refleksje. Album tworzony we współpracy z wnuczką pisarza nie tylko zasypuje nas przepięknymi, poruszającymi, publicznymi i bardziej prywatnymi zdjęciami Ernesta (również tymi autorstwa niezapomnianego Roberta Capy). W podziale ze względu na różne sfery pisarza autorzy zwracają uwagę na zjawiska, wydarzenia i uczucia pisarza, które zazwyczaj są spychane na bok, przemilczane, pominięte w wielkiej gonitwie jego biografii. Ogromna waga położona jest na portrecie twórcy jako osoby, która nie mogła pozbyć się swojej własnej legendy w świecie publicznym; z jednej strony Hemingway sam ją rozwijał i jej łaknął, z drugiej miała na niego destrukcyjny wpływ, przesłaniała wszystko to, co naprawdę i z wielką intensywnością działo się w jego sercu. Osoby pracujące nad publikacją świetnie i z pełnym szacunkiem ukazały to, jak niejednoznaczną, nierzadko cierpiącą, przeżywającą wątpliwości, lecz niewiarygodnie zdeterminowaną osobą był Hemingway; zaadresowały to, jak przebijał się przez fikcję i jak jego twórczość portretowała samego autora. Album rozszerzył moją perspektywę; oddał to, co równocześnie wprawia mnie w wątpliwość, jak i sprawia, że tym bardziej mi zależy. Choć może pozostawać to niezrozumiałe.
W przypadku osoby tak obłożonej legendami i ostrymi osądami jak Ernest Hemingway, wyjątkowo ważne są takie publikacje jak Hemingway: A Life in Pictures. Pięknie prześwitują przez nią jego jasność i cienie, w których zdarzało mu się odnaleźć schronienie. Wiem, że nie chciał on natłoku biografii swojej osoby, ale tak się cieszę, że opowieści o nim przetrwały.
PS. To jest niepoważne, ile soft nudes Ernesta Hemingwaya widziałam w swoim życiu.
August 6, 2012
Had to read this after I finished The Paris Wife to see what was fact and what was fiction! Enjoyable, great photos.
June 10, 2012
Some photographs are great to look but after a while it is like looking at a personal photo album where only the subject would enjoy perusing through it. I also did not like how the timeline jumps around too much I would be pulled in to the biography but the next page would skip to a different decade. I had to check the page numbers because I thought pages were missing.
March 18, 2012
I really enjoyed looking at the different images of Ernest throughout his life. I feel like it could have been arranged in a better order. It seemed that things were out of place. Regardless, I still liked it.
November 6, 2018
I did not expect much from this book when I bought it. The New York Times review was not particularly complimentary and my interest was more in the photographic reproductions than in any of the accompanying text. I had read most of Hemingway’s works through Islands in the Stream, the first volume of his collected letters published by Cambridge Press and Kenneth Lynn’s biography. I simply wanted pictures to go with that reading.
Most of the original photographs in the book are housed in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Those that come from other sources the authors have identified in an appendix. Some of the photos have long been in the public domain and will be quite familiar; others are not as common. Still others are noted for their absence. For example, there are no pictures of Maxwell Perkins, his long-time editor at Scribner’s; Aaron Hotchner, his intimate friend during the final years of his life and the author of a controversial biography; Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of the Pilar; Jane Mason, one of the women who engaged Hemingway during his marriage to Pauline. There is one of Charles Thompson, Hemingway’s companion on his first African safari and who appears significantly in The Green Hills of Africa with the name of Karl, but the face is obscured by an antelope horn. There is a photo of Hemingway’s birth-home in Oak Park but not of the home his mother built and in which he lived for years. Neither is there a picture of the exterior of Finca Vigia, his Cuban home nor of the home in Ketchum, Idaho where he committed suicide. It might have been interesting also to have included pictures of his sons in their later years. But all that is really insignificant. The photos that the authors did include in the volume were well-chosen and instructive.
It was the text that surprised me. It turned out to be far stronger than I had anticipated. It often captured succinctly much of Hemingway’s actual and fictional life as well as the controlling themes of many of his works. It laid out clearly the areas of controversy in both his life and in his writings. It gave the reader a solid verbal snapshot of Hemingway unvarnished. For example, focusing on Hemingway’s WWI experience in Italy, Boris Vejdovsky noted:
In the section that deals with the African safaris is this concluding observation:
Or, as another example, in the discussion of the book Islands in the Stream, is the following observation:
What takes a while to understand is the book’s organization. It is not rigorously chronological. The first 6 sections or chapters are organized thematically around what the authors describe as Hemingway’s “fictional topography.” In the arrangement or order of those sections there is a type of chronological flow whose headings are titles of either a Hemingway short story or book that for someone familiar with Hemingway’s works provides a clue to the content. Within each section, the text does proceed chronologically:
• The first section, titled “Indian Camp”, subtitled “An American Childhood”, deals with Hem’s youth and young adulthood in the Midwest that is the topography for almost all of the Nick Adams stories.
• The second section titled “In Another Country”, subtitled “Hemingway’s European Education”, focuses on Hemingway’s time in Italy and Spain and Europe during WWI and WWII that became the topography for, in addition to a number of short stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and Into the Woods –books that deal with war or some aspect of war.
• The third section titled “A Moveable Feast”, subtitled “Paris, Song of Innocence and Experience”, focuses on Hemingway’s years in Paris and the Alps (1921-1928) that is the fictional topography for a number of the short stories as well as for the first part of The Sun also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
• The fourth section titled “The Capital of the World” and subtitled “Writing and Death” deals with the time Hemingway spent with bullfighting in Spain (thru 1959) that is the topography for Death in the Afternoon and A Dangerous Summer as well as short stories like “The Undefeated”.
• The fifth section titled “The Hills of Kilimanjaro” and subtitled “Africa, the Last Frontier” discusses Hemingway’s Africa safaris and is the topography of The Green Hills of Africa as well of such short stories as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”.
• The sixth section titled “Islands in the Stream” and subtitled “A Writer Sets Sail” focuses on the years Hemingway lived in Key West and Cuba that became the topography for To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream.
• The last two sections are strictly thematic and are not rooted topographically. One, titled “Hills Like White Elephants” discusses the women in Hemingway’s life. The last section, titled “The Last Good Country”, discusses Hem’s final years with his physical, mental and emotional challenges.
The editing was a bit disappointing. Given the book’s intended quality and the unexpected strength of the commentaries, there were numerous either factual or labeling errors that were distracting:
• Page 22: Hemingway’s mother did not, I believe, take him out of school, only his sister.
• Page 23: Calling his mother Mrs. Hemingstein or Mrs. Stein, since he often called himself Hemingstein or Stein, was probably not indicative of his hostility to Grace or a pointed anti-Semitic remark, even recognizing that he had a streak of anti-Semitism.
• Page 25: During Hemingway’s youth, northern Michigan was not “largely uncivilized.”
• Page 26: The Ojibway population around the Petoskey area was not, by the early 1900s, “dense.”
• Page 32: The capital of Missouri was not Kansas City.
• Page 35: The trip invoked in “Indian Camp” was not the one he took in 1919 with his friends.
• Page 65: (a) Hemingway’s Paris years ran from 1921 to 1928. (b) The directions at the end of the last paragraph are incorrect. (c) The Methodist Chapel was located in Horton Bay, near Walloon Lake (not Bay). (d) Hemingway and Hadley did not move to Toronto until 1927 after having moved to Paris.
• Page 110: The 1951 conversation with Pauline was about Gregory and not Patrick.
• Page 136: The person in picture #2 with Hemingway is Mike Strater and not Joe Lowe.
• Page 140: The person to Hemingway’s right in picture #3 does not appear to be Spencer Tracy.
• Page 149: The Patrick involved with the re-editing of A Moveable Feast was Hem’s son, not his grandson.
• Page 150: In picture #3, Carol is the shorter and younger of the two sisters: the names are reversed.
• Page 153: In picture #1, the children might be John (the bigger child) and Patrick?
Even with the errors, Hemingway: A Life in Pictures is a contribution to our appreciation and understanding of Hemingway as one of America’s literary icons.
Most of the original photographs in the book are housed in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Those that come from other sources the authors have identified in an appendix. Some of the photos have long been in the public domain and will be quite familiar; others are not as common. Still others are noted for their absence. For example, there are no pictures of Maxwell Perkins, his long-time editor at Scribner’s; Aaron Hotchner, his intimate friend during the final years of his life and the author of a controversial biography; Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of the Pilar; Jane Mason, one of the women who engaged Hemingway during his marriage to Pauline. There is one of Charles Thompson, Hemingway’s companion on his first African safari and who appears significantly in The Green Hills of Africa with the name of Karl, but the face is obscured by an antelope horn. There is a photo of Hemingway’s birth-home in Oak Park but not of the home his mother built and in which he lived for years. Neither is there a picture of the exterior of Finca Vigia, his Cuban home nor of the home in Ketchum, Idaho where he committed suicide. It might have been interesting also to have included pictures of his sons in their later years. But all that is really insignificant. The photos that the authors did include in the volume were well-chosen and instructive.
It was the text that surprised me. It turned out to be far stronger than I had anticipated. It often captured succinctly much of Hemingway’s actual and fictional life as well as the controlling themes of many of his works. It laid out clearly the areas of controversy in both his life and in his writings. It gave the reader a solid verbal snapshot of Hemingway unvarnished. For example, focusing on Hemingway’s WWI experience in Italy, Boris Vejdovsky noted:
“Although he might have left…[the war in Italy] for a time, Ernest took from it what was his most precious and inspiring material: wounds of body and soul, confrontation with death, a sense of abandonment, even betrayal, the conviction that he would always be a man without a woman—themes that would inhabit the fiction of his life and the life of his fiction.”
In the section that deals with the African safaris is this concluding observation:
If the first trip was a young man’s exploration of new limits and entry into an unknown territory, the second was a return to places haunted by memory but also by fear of old age and death.
Or, as another example, in the discussion of the book Islands in the Stream, is the following observation:
Published nine years after Ernest’s suicide and after the biographies that had begun to reveal the architecture of the Hemingway monument, the book [Islands in the Stream] underlines the disquiet that inhabits his prose, his dark side and that stream that would eventually carry him off.
What takes a while to understand is the book’s organization. It is not rigorously chronological. The first 6 sections or chapters are organized thematically around what the authors describe as Hemingway’s “fictional topography.” In the arrangement or order of those sections there is a type of chronological flow whose headings are titles of either a Hemingway short story or book that for someone familiar with Hemingway’s works provides a clue to the content. Within each section, the text does proceed chronologically:
• The first section, titled “Indian Camp”, subtitled “An American Childhood”, deals with Hem’s youth and young adulthood in the Midwest that is the topography for almost all of the Nick Adams stories.
• The second section titled “In Another Country”, subtitled “Hemingway’s European Education”, focuses on Hemingway’s time in Italy and Spain and Europe during WWI and WWII that became the topography for, in addition to a number of short stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and Into the Woods –books that deal with war or some aspect of war.
• The third section titled “A Moveable Feast”, subtitled “Paris, Song of Innocence and Experience”, focuses on Hemingway’s years in Paris and the Alps (1921-1928) that is the fictional topography for a number of the short stories as well as for the first part of The Sun also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
• The fourth section titled “The Capital of the World” and subtitled “Writing and Death” deals with the time Hemingway spent with bullfighting in Spain (thru 1959) that is the topography for Death in the Afternoon and A Dangerous Summer as well as short stories like “The Undefeated”.
• The fifth section titled “The Hills of Kilimanjaro” and subtitled “Africa, the Last Frontier” discusses Hemingway’s Africa safaris and is the topography of The Green Hills of Africa as well of such short stories as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”.
• The sixth section titled “Islands in the Stream” and subtitled “A Writer Sets Sail” focuses on the years Hemingway lived in Key West and Cuba that became the topography for To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream.
• The last two sections are strictly thematic and are not rooted topographically. One, titled “Hills Like White Elephants” discusses the women in Hemingway’s life. The last section, titled “The Last Good Country”, discusses Hem’s final years with his physical, mental and emotional challenges.
The editing was a bit disappointing. Given the book’s intended quality and the unexpected strength of the commentaries, there were numerous either factual or labeling errors that were distracting:
• Page 22: Hemingway’s mother did not, I believe, take him out of school, only his sister.
• Page 23: Calling his mother Mrs. Hemingstein or Mrs. Stein, since he often called himself Hemingstein or Stein, was probably not indicative of his hostility to Grace or a pointed anti-Semitic remark, even recognizing that he had a streak of anti-Semitism.
• Page 25: During Hemingway’s youth, northern Michigan was not “largely uncivilized.”
• Page 26: The Ojibway population around the Petoskey area was not, by the early 1900s, “dense.”
• Page 32: The capital of Missouri was not Kansas City.
• Page 35: The trip invoked in “Indian Camp” was not the one he took in 1919 with his friends.
• Page 65: (a) Hemingway’s Paris years ran from 1921 to 1928. (b) The directions at the end of the last paragraph are incorrect. (c) The Methodist Chapel was located in Horton Bay, near Walloon Lake (not Bay). (d) Hemingway and Hadley did not move to Toronto until 1927 after having moved to Paris.
• Page 110: The 1951 conversation with Pauline was about Gregory and not Patrick.
• Page 136: The person in picture #2 with Hemingway is Mike Strater and not Joe Lowe.
• Page 140: The person to Hemingway’s right in picture #3 does not appear to be Spencer Tracy.
• Page 149: The Patrick involved with the re-editing of A Moveable Feast was Hem’s son, not his grandson.
• Page 150: In picture #3, Carol is the shorter and younger of the two sisters: the names are reversed.
• Page 153: In picture #1, the children might be John (the bigger child) and Patrick?
Even with the errors, Hemingway: A Life in Pictures is a contribution to our appreciation and understanding of Hemingway as one of America’s literary icons.
July 29, 2018
If you're a true Hemingway fan as I am, than this is a must! It's Jam-packed with wonderful memories that reveal the icon's life and career through an absorbing account of some amazingly candid snapshots. Those familiar with the writer's life and career may not find anything new but I can promise, you won't be disappointed as you turn each and every page of this most intimate "photo album". It truly is "A Life in Pictures".
May 19, 2018
As a big fan of Ernest Hemingway I was delighted to spot this book by chance in a London bookshop.
The book is full of wonderful photos of ‘Papa’ throughout his life as well as explanatory notes by Boris Vejdovsky. Hemingway had a very public persona as a general tough guy who loved nothing more than hunting in Africa, having flings with beautiful women, drinking and fighting however in many of the photos we see a more private side to him such as husband and loving father to his three sons.
This book is a must have for any Hemingway fan and won’t disappoint. It’s not the sort of book I would say I had ‘finished’ as I will doubtless pick it up many times in the future and flick through.
My only minor criticism of the book is the writing style of Vejdovsky which at times I found cheesy and irritating. As a biography of Hemingway it would be pretty awful but if you ignore Vejdovsky’s input and just focus on the photographs you won’t be disappointed.
The book is full of wonderful photos of ‘Papa’ throughout his life as well as explanatory notes by Boris Vejdovsky. Hemingway had a very public persona as a general tough guy who loved nothing more than hunting in Africa, having flings with beautiful women, drinking and fighting however in many of the photos we see a more private side to him such as husband and loving father to his three sons.
This book is a must have for any Hemingway fan and won’t disappoint. It’s not the sort of book I would say I had ‘finished’ as I will doubtless pick it up many times in the future and flick through.
My only minor criticism of the book is the writing style of Vejdovsky which at times I found cheesy and irritating. As a biography of Hemingway it would be pretty awful but if you ignore Vejdovsky’s input and just focus on the photographs you won’t be disappointed.
August 22, 2012
Hemingway's life is brought to a modern audience through various pictures and images. The photos were beautiful and I really enjoyed looking through everything and seeing how one stage of his life moved into another. I have a strong background knowledge of Hemingway though as I've taken several classes and done my own reading. I would say that without that background knowledge, this text would have been frustrating and incomplete. Some sections were grouped in such a way as to be extremely nonlinear, to the point of confusion about people Hemingway knew or places he was in at a certain time. I had to flip back and forth as I thought that I missed important passages, only to realize that the important facts simply were not written in the text. I would suggest this as an additional reading for someone looking in to Hemingway's life, but not as an opening text for introductory readers.
January 22, 2012
This book needed a better proofreader. A photo of Ernest Hemingway and Spencer Tracy (p. 140) is clearly not Spencer Tracy. Veidovsky gets mixed up as to where Hemingway and Hadley's marriage took place (p. 65). They were married in Michigan not in "Walloon Bay near Oak Park." The author also alludes to two extramarital affairs with Jane Mason (p. 159) and Debba p. 115. Since this is "a life in pictures," I would have liked to see pictures of these women.
July 6, 2016
C'est vraiment un très beau livre. Énorme et contenant de très nombreuses photos qui illustre parfaitement la vie d'Ernest Hemingway.
Je ne peux pas dire que ce livre m'ai rendu Hemingway sympathique, ce serait plutôt le contraire mais il est quand même intéressant de découvrir la vie d'un auteur si célèbre.
Je ne peux pas dire que ce livre m'ai rendu Hemingway sympathique, ce serait plutôt le contraire mais il est quand même intéressant de découvrir la vie d'un auteur si célèbre.
March 2, 2017
This was just a quick diversion from a novel that I am reading. Pictures and text following Hem's life, organized by theme. I think a more careful editing may be necessary for the pictures, as it seemed that at times, people's names were omitted.
June 13, 2012
good read with interesting photos
August 5, 2020
A must for everybody interested in Hemingway.
This biography contains hundreds of pics and describes many details like Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920's, his time in Spain, in Africa, in Cuba, on Key West etc.
I didn't get into Hemingway's books as I did into John Steinbeck's novels, but thoroughly enjoyed reading his Paris memoir, "A Moveable Feast".
This biography contains hundreds of pics and describes many details like Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920's, his time in Spain, in Africa, in Cuba, on Key West etc.
I didn't get into Hemingway's books as I did into John Steinbeck's novels, but thoroughly enjoyed reading his Paris memoir, "A Moveable Feast".
January 9, 2024
Great photos throughout....an informative but sad tribute to the writer who had it all and died not experiencing the satisfaction and fulfillment he wanted/needed. The text is interesting as it weaves through the stages of Ernest's life, citing the locations and events that compromise a fascinating story.
May 6, 2021
This is a book published as a comment on Hemingway’s life through pictures. It includes over 300 unpublished photos and documents which give us an intimate glimpse of his life and his struggle between the image and his actual life.
June 19, 2024
A wonderful book for readers who love and admire the works of Hemingway.
With great photos spanning his entire lifetime accompanied by well written stories and descriptions.
A great way to get to know what he was really like and about the childhood that so influenced the man he became.
With great photos spanning his entire lifetime accompanied by well written stories and descriptions.
A great way to get to know what he was really like and about the childhood that so influenced the man he became.
February 23, 2012
Very intereting table top book. Exquisite photographs.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews