Hemingway The 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.

Drawing on a wealth of new material and period documents, the author of The Young Hemingway traces Ernest Hemingway's development from promising young novelist to a master during the thirties, illuminating his literary evolution and the people, places, and times that influenced it.

The 1920s in Paris are the pivotal years in Hemingway's apprenticeship as a writer, whether sitting in cafés or at the feet of Gertrude Stein. These are the heady times of the Nick Adams short stories, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the writing of The Sun Also Rises. These are also the years of Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, the birth of his first son, and his discovery of the bullfights at Pamplona.

"The Young Hemingway will entertain and surprise. Not only is it a significant contribution to Hemingway critical biography, but it should rank as one of the best nonfiction books of the year."—Los Angeles Times Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway through World War I, where he was frustrated by being too far away from the action and glory, despite his being wounded and nursed to health by Agnes Von Kurowsky—the older woman with whom he fell terribly in love.

Incorporating fascinating new research, Mary Dearborn’s revelatory investigation of Hemingway’s life and work substantially deepens our understanding of the artist and the man. A St. Louis Post Dispatch Best Book of the Year The “most fully faceted portrait of Hemingway now available” (The Washington Post) draws on a wide array of never-before-used material, resulting in the most nuanced biography to date of this complex, enigmatic artist. Considered in his time the greatest living American writer, Hemingway was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize whose personal demons undid him in the end, and whose novels and stories have influenced the writing of fiction for generations after his death.

Published to coincide with the release of the HBO film Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. 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.

Ernest Hemingway always had cats as companions, from the ones he adored as a child in Illinois and Michigan, to the more than 30 he had as an adult in Paris, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. All are chronicled and most are pictured here, along with revelations of how they fit into the many twists and turns of his life and loves. In 1943 Ernest Hemingway, living in the Finca in Cuba with his third wife and eleven cats, wrote to his first wife: "One cat just leads to another... The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time." He called the cats “purr factories" and “love sponges" who soaked up love in return for comfort and companionship. He gave each a name that suited its character, including F. Puss, Fatso, Friendless, Feather Kitty, Princessa, Furhouse, Uncle Woofer, and his last cat in Idaho, Big Boy Peterson. You'll also meet his nine dogs, a cow, and a young great horned owl that he rescued not long before his death. Hemingway's Cats reveals a softer side to the writer's character than is usually portrayed by the macho image of the hunter and fisherman. He sought the cats' comfort in times of loneliness and stress, and he featured some of them in his writings, particularly in A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light—all written late in his life and as close to autobiography as he came.