First published 2000
Michael Reynolds uncovers the hidden story of Ernest Hemingway's most dangerous and productive decades. The author traces Hemingway's secret counterintelligence work in Havana during World War II, operations that few knew about until Reynolds brought them to light. The book follows Hemingway through his most creative postwar years, when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea and won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Reynolds shows how the writer's public persona as a hunter and adventurer demanded a physical lifestyle that his aging body could no longer sustain. The biography captures the contradiction between Hemingway's literary success and his declining health, both mental and physical, during his final years. Reynolds documents how the pressure to maintain his larger than life image contributed to the writer's 1961 suicide, cementing his place in American mythology.
Genres: biography, history, literary-fiction, 20th-century, american, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: declining-health, larger-than-life, public-persona
Setting: Havana, United States
Period: World War II, Postwar
420 pages · Paperback · W. W. Norton & Company
Content warnings: mental-illness, suicide