Hemingway The American Homecoming

"A living, breathing biography that reads like a good novel…The stuff of which Pulitzer prizes are made." —Library Journal (starred review) Hemingway: The Homecoming, Michael Reynolds's extraordinary evocation of Hemingway's life, finds the writer in Paris in 1926 having just finished The Sun Also Rises, and follows him through the dissolution of his first marriage and the beginning of his second. We witness the emergence of the public image of Hemingway and his development into a mature and major literary talent. Most significantly, Reynolds reveals how the emerging Hemingway hero—tough, masculine, self-reliant—represented a radical break from figures in his earlier work, who are vulnerable, wounded survivors living precariously in a world in which they have little control. And he shows how this transition had its roots in Hemingway's own life, as he developed from a rootless and insecure expatriot into a forceful figure of myth, influenced by his father's suicide, his second marriage, and his return to America.

Gathers and describes photographs and paintings of the American writer, and uses them to trace his life

New scholarly essays providing a multifaceted approach to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work.

The first extensive study of Hemingway's relationship to his hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, and the influence its people, places, and underlying values had on his early work."Fresh and insightful essays provide extended and focused discussion of issues central to Hemingway's literary identity". -- Susan Beegel, The Hemingway Review

Traces Hemingway's critical fortunes over the ninety years of his prominence, telling us something about what we value in literature and why scholarly reputations rise and fall.

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

This Companion serves both as an introduction for the interested reader and as a source of the best recent scholarship on the author and his works. In addition to analysing his major texts, the contributors provide insights into Hemingway's relationship with gender history, journalism, fame and the political climate of the 1930s. The essays are framed by an introductory chapter on Hemingway and the costs of fame and an invaluable conclusion providing an overview of Hemingway scholarship from its beginnings to the present. Students will find the selected bibliography a useful guide to future research. Contributors include both distinguished established figures and brilliant newcomers, all chosen with regard to the clarity and readability of their prose.