Ernest hemingway biography reviews

With “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography,” Mary V. Dearborn becomes the first woman to tackle a full-scale life of that hypermasculine writer.
A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer.
They describe it as a well-researched, insightful look into the life of Ernest Hemingway that provides new perspectives.

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

One of this biography's achievements is to deepen our understanding of Hemingway's fraught relationship with his mother ... Dearborn captures Hemingway in all of his extremes, the story of a hugely flawed and endlessly compelling human being producing enduring art.

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Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother ... Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend ... Dearborn skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material; she is an indefatigable researcher. But I’m not an indefatigable reader, and her insistence on using every minute detail slows the momentum of Hemingway’s story ... Ultimately, the scale of Hemingway’s life is so colossal and his motives so convoluted that no biographer, however gifted, can neatly sever the legend from the life, or have the last word on its meaning.

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Reviews of Biographies of Ernest Hemingway
From the Archives of The New York Times
Related Articles
Featured Author: Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway Collection/ JFK Library, Boston
Hemingway as a child in Willow Lake, Michigan.
Carlos Baker's 'Ernest Hemingway'(1968)
"Professor Baker has delivered his trophy and it is, as promised, a life-size replica of Ernest Hemingway. . . . In plain language, reading Carlos Baker's long-awaited biography is hugely exasperating. But then so, apparently, was Ernest Hemingway."
Bernice Kert's 'The Hemingway Women'(1983)
"Kert's study proves valuable in ways that are different from, and certainly more graceful than, the usual psychobiography. By re-creating Hemingway's life from the perspective of his wives and lovers, a now-familiar story achieves greater dimension."
Raymond Carver on Hemingway Biographies by Jeffrey Meyers and Peter Griffin(1985)
"Adulation is not a requirement for biographers, but Mr. Meyers's book fairly bristles with d
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New bio: Why we can't get enough of 'Papa' Hemingway
For somebody best known for writing books, Ernest Hemingway was as famous as any movie star, sports hero or rock idol you can name in the last century — or this one. That’s right. This one. It seems we still can’t stop talking about him even beyond the Millennium.
The April publication of Hemingway’s Brain, a forensic inquiry into the physical traumas that led to his suicide in 1961, is being followed by Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway (Knopf, 627 pp., *** out of four stars), the first full-fledged biography in 15 years.
It, too, is a kind of extended autopsy, not only of Hemingway’s life, but his reputations as a model of American virility and as an enduring literary figure. All of these were subject to intense scrutiny by scholars, journalists and skeptics even when Hemingway was a living, breathing Nobel Prize winner.
Though some may wonder whether at this late date we need 600-plus pages on one of the most written-about lives in literature, Dearborn’s contribution to the biographical corpus benefits from bringi