Hemingway: The 1930's

This new biography focuses on the maturing Hemingway when fame is hitting full force the years between A Farewell to Arms and the writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls. During the bleak years of the thirties, Ernest Hemingway matured as a writer against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution, African game trails, Key West impoverishment, and the Spanish Civil War. Reaching for a prose not yet written, he experimented in fiction and nonfiction, pushing his limits as a writer. In a sympathetic narrative, Michael Reynolds creates a rich map of Hemingway's journey from promising young novelist to literary lion. He gives us the look and feel of the times and the people, as well as the give and take of literary life. We come away from this book knowing more about what Hemingway wrote and why. We also know more about where we as a people have been, for Hemingway explored every element of this decade with the intensity of a natural historian. Drawing on a wealth of new material and period documents, Reynolds adds a human touch to a writer too often seen only in caricature. Hemingway: The 1930s illuminates a time, a place, and a man that have captured the American imagination and have defined the American experience.