Hemingway's great achievement was to free the novel from all the languid decoration and cozy indirectness that was its early twentieth-century inheritance. His terse prose taught the writer to engage life to the fullest in order to write about it, and his own life was the perfect demonstration of that principle.
Reissued to coincide with the centenary of Hemingway's birth, Anthony Burgess's insightful biography traces the rapidly changing scene from a happy, complacent childhood to the grim reality of the First World War and the vulgar unreality of the Second; from the Paris of the 1920s to the Spain of Civil War and the excitements of African safari to the somber last years in Cuba. Hemingway was rich and successful from an early age, yet public the fact that acclaim and even the Nobel Prize could not disguise he was a moody, suffering, and sometimes vicious figure -- a man who was finally unable to live with his own image.
