Hemingway: The 1930s through the Final Years

Reynolds' Hemingway #4 & 5

by Michael S. Reynolds

Michael Reynolds was the
supreme biographer of Ernest Hemingway. HBO’s film concentrates on Hemingway’s
years with his third wife, the adventurous journalist Martha Gellhorn. This
book brings together Reynolds’s Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

800 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2012

About the author

As part of Reynolds' lifelong research, aided by his wife and editor Ann, he followed Hemingway's travels through Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Key West, Fla., and visited the novelist's childhood home in Oak Park, Ill.

Reynolds served on the editorial board of the Hemingway Review. He also helped establish the Hemingway Society, which presents the annual Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for the best first work of fiction published in the U.S., and organized its biannual conferences for Hemingway scholars. The professor was particularly delighted with the 1996 conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, one of Hemingway's familiar stomping grounds, which was attended by five friends of the late author.

Internationally respected, Reynolds was consulted in 1992 about 20 newly discovered newspaper stories allegedly written by Hemingway for the Toronto Star in the early 1920s. Some of the articles, which Reynolds and other scholars authenticated, were found in the Hemingway section of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the world's leading center of Hemingway studies.[More...]

Reviews

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-release of two volumes combined (The 1930s and The Final Years) from an earlier five volume, some would say definitive, Hemingway bio. It is being marketed as a movie tie in to the Hemingway/Gelhorn HBO biopic, though this one covers many more years and phases and marriages than the movie does. From a biographical standpoint, these are the years that I find most interesting (the Paris years being a close second), the ones in which Hemingway becomes the cultural icon and begins to, perhaps consciously, play up the image he has created of himself. These are the years of Key West and Havana with lots of travels in between. Reynolds takes a creative approach that often gets inside Hemingway's head. Some might object to this as the biographer inserting too much of himself into his subject, but so far I'm loving it. Reynolds research into the minutia of Hemingway's life far surpasses other bios I've read. From an enjoyment standpoint, for me this is right up there with Hotchner's characterization in Papa Hemingway.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid final parts of the story, spiraling downwards inexorably.