Mary Dearborn does great work to separate the Hemingway myth of his later years from the complicated and frustrating artist who won such acclaim. I was struck again and again by how fleeting the age of the novel was, and struggle to imagine an author ever capturing the public imagination again. The final chapters ran long in their focus on Hemingway's decline, and circumspect review of how his treatments (pharmaceutical, therapeutic, diagnostic) could have been improved just a few years later. The book does not hang well together in a short reading, with many anecdotes and observations re-hashed and reframed, as though the editors anticipated the book being serialized or excerpted; over explaining small details to ensure that a reader of a single chapter doesn't lack context left me constantly pulled out of the flow of the book thinking, "yes, didn't we just go over that?" ( )

I have probably read more about Hemingway then what he actually wrote. Second full biography and a few topic type books on him. This one digs deeply into the character and psyche of the man, and it's not a very nice picture. Hemingway was all about image and personna, but going beneath that veneer was a fairly troubled individual who in spite of his many friends and acquaintances managed to alienate quite a few of them.

His family history and relationships with parents and siblings set the stage for much of what played out in his life as is usually the case with most people. His writing much if not most autobiographically paints how he viewed himself as well as the many counter players. Dearborn captures much of these complexities and entanglements through his wives, family, and friends.

His tragic decline was inevitable and despite that ending we cannot say the man did not live much larger then most. Albeit in a world he created as much of fiction as his writing. ( )

"There's no one thing that's true. It's all true." - Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway's version of "truth" draws a lot from the line in the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": "When legend becomes fact, print the legend." He was inventing his own mythology before he was even out of his teens, transforming a one-week stint as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I into a enlistment in the Italian Army serving in the elite special forces of the Arditi Corps. Another 40+ years of tale-spinning to friends and journalists and the blurred crossover of non-fiction into fiction in many of the short stories and novels complicates the task of all the subsequent biographers.

Mary Dearborn unravels as much as can be currently done using the latest pieces of the puzzle that are gradually being unveiled to us through various other studies (e.g. those such as "Ernest Hemingway's a Moveable Feast" that examine the veracity of "A Moveable Feast", the ongoing & continuing Letters project "The Letters of Ernest Hemingway" (Volume 4 of 17 will be published as of September 2017) and the recent memoirs and biographies that have focussed on specialized topics and themes e.g. "Hemingway in Love: His Own Story", "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961", "The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War", "Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage", "Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961".

Dearborn does especially draw attention to Hemingway's androgynous hair fetish, the love-hate relationship with youngest son Gregory (Gigi) Hemingway (who later transgendered into Gloria) and the final sad years of mental illness which may have been triggered as early as the concussion injury sustained in a World War II London car crash. Much of what was written post-WWII was never published at the time and some of it only in posthumous heavily edited forms such as the gender bending "The Garden of Eden" (probably too risque for both its late 40's writing time and the author's marketed image) and the various edited versions of the final African journey "True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir" and "Under Kilimanjaro". The ongoing Hemingway Library Edition may yet show us more of those unknowns as well although the story seems to be never-ending. Whatever questions fascinate you about this one person's life can likely never be fully answered and the journey itself becomes the goal. In that I see Hemingway as a stand-in for all humankind. Even with all of this ongoing documentation he is still a mystery and the subject of endless curiousity for us.

I read "Ernest Hemingway" in hardcover by Mary V.. Dearborn in parallel with the audiobook edition narrated by Tanya Eby. The narration was excellent and clear and well-paced.

#ThereIsAlwaysOne
Erratum
pg. 428 "...the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1941."
As most with a heritage from the Baltic States or Eastern Europe will know, the Hitler-Stalin Pact actually dates from August 22, 1939.

Trivia
Great use of a "Crook Factory"/"Operation Friendless"/"Hooligan Navy" image as the cover photo. The second use of this one I believe cf. The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons ( )