Hemingway: The Final Years [Hardcover]

Michael S. Reynolds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

Ernest Hemingway's triumphs as a writer during the 1940s and 1950s accompanied a life of risk and danger. Michael Reynolds discovers the truth about Hemingway's activities during the war years, including running a counterintelligence operation in Havana and riding a landing craft into Omaha Beach on D-Day. The post-war period, when he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea", was the most productive time of Hemingway's writing life but his physical and mental health deteriorated. In 1961 he committed suicide. Using interviews, letters, memoirs and previously classified documents, Reynolds brings his eyes to Hemingway's later years, recreating his life and the atmosphere of post-war America.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If one had to choose just one of Michael Reynolds's five volumes on Hemingway, The Final Years would probably be the best choice. Beginning with the fanfare surrounding the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the eve of the Second World War and ending with Hemingway's suicide in 1961, the book puts all that had come before into perspective even as it probes these last two decades of its subject's life. The amount of detail is staggering--and sometimes, particularly in the case of his troubled fourth marriage to Mary Welsh, painfully discomfiting. (Long before Mary interrupts a conversation between Hem and Lauren Bacall to show Bacall a bullet she keeps for anybody who makes a move on her husband, the reader has figured out that the marriage was not exactly happy.)

The sections on Hemingway's wartime exploits, both in Cuba as a volunteer U-boat hunter and in Europe as a correspondent, are fascinating. But even in these moments--hell, even when he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel--Hemingway was subject to what he called "black ass" bouts of depression, an inherited condition that (as Reynolds notes) wasn't helped by his drinking or his tendency to put himself into dangerous situations in which he could suffer yet another severe concussion. Reynolds has traced the great writer's psychological decline so thoroughly that, when Hemingway puts the shotgun in his mouth in the final chapter, it is not as if the expected conclusion has finally arrived; rather, the reader has been made to feel an even deeper sense of the inevitability of the act. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

The concluding installment of Reynolds's (Hemingway: The Paris Years) three-volume life of Papa makes a fitting centennial tribute to one of the most influential American writers of the century. Here Reynolds chronicles Hemingway's life from 1940 to his suicide by shotgun in July 1961. Beginning with the writer's tumultuous third marriage to journalist Martha Gellhorn, Reynolds takes readers through the end of the Spanish Civil War, the great success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, WWII and Hemingway's self-exaggerated role in "liberating" Paris, the triumph of The Old Man and the Sea, the Nobel Prize and the author's slow but certain physical and mental decline. Readers have front-row seats for his stormy fourth and last marriage to Mary Welsh, a relationship marked by continual brawls and reconciliations, and we follow the couple through Europe and Africa, enduring the back-to-back helicopter crashes that left Hemingway physically battered and emotionally scarred. Touchingly, in his final years, Hemingway sought to return to the people and places of his past, only to confront the futility of doing so. Hemingway suffered from severe depression and increasing paranoia, Reynolds writes, and his decline was hastened by shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. Ultimately, he was unable to complete several ambitious projects, works eventually published as A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, The Dangerous Summer and, just out from Scribner, True at First Light. Recent scholarship and the release of important archival information make it clear that the demands placed on the celebrity Papa, a self-created and self-perpetuated myth, only hastened the end. As Reynolds concludes, Hemingway's story is one "the ancient Greeks would have recognized." (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047482
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047486
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #445,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Acclaimed Biographical Series Draws To A Worthy Close, July 20, 1999

By 

Bill Fleck (Wurtsboro, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hemingway: The Final Years (Hardcover)

It's difficult now to explain to a high school Junior reading THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA why Hemingway is still important. This is because we have so thoroughly digested him. He seems raw in his pure form.

But perhaps the strangest Hemingway fact is that there are more books ABOUT him than there are BY him. As a stylist, we have learned his lessons. As a flawed icon, he has much to teach us.

This is why, perhaps, biographies of America's most famous writer still tend to sell well. Well enough even to merit Michael Reynold's five volume study, which is brought to completion with HEMINGWAY: THE FINAL YEARS.

With this volume, Reynolds has finally replaced Carlos Baker as the definitive Hemingway biographer. And why not? The series has featured authentic scholarship plus a tone of fairness, and an occasional surprise.

It has also been very well written. My personal favorite is HEMINGWAY: THE 1930s--perhaps not Hemingway's most productive time, but Reynold's masterpiece.

THE FINAL YEARS almost measures up. Dealing with the last two decades of Hemingway's life (which, in spite of the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes, can only be described as disastrous), Reynolds effectively traces a brilliant talent shot to hell by depression, drugs, and alcoholism. Along the way, he deftly sketches in the "supporting cast": Martha, the independent third wife; Mary, her long-suffering successor; the sons Jack, Patrick, and Gregory; and the important flirtations Adriana and Valerie. Hemingway's final descent into suicidal depression has never been more grippingly told.

The book's one flaw is its abrupt ending. Following the suicide, Reynolds tidies up with a one page epilogue, a rapid "over-and-out" summary that leaves his reader cold. In a biography of five volumes, you might expect a discussion of the aftermath, the funeral, the posthumous works, and the tragedy of yet another suicide (Jack's daughter Margaux). Instead, one must refer to Jeffrey Meyers' reissued HEMINGWAY (1985) for these sort of details.

But this is a small problem in an otherwise superior foray into Hemingway biography, a field Reynolds can now feel he leads.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Worthy Finale for a Scholarly Giant, July 9, 2001

By 

Robert P. Lamb "The Literary Eagle" (Cambridge, Massachusetts United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hemingway: The Final Years (Paperback)

There is little I can add to the above reviews. Long before this final volume of Michael Reynolds' masterpiece came out, he had already taken his place as our finest Hemingway scholar and one of the five or six greatest literary biographers of our time. This last volume merely confirms his position. Tragically, he succumbed to cancer shortly after this book appeared, but he left us a daunting legacy as a scholar. I doubt anyone ever understood the infinitely complex Hemingway as well as Professor Reynolds did. It is a cause for celebration when a major writer and a great biographer come together; these volumes will never grow old.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent biography, although by no means definitive, August 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Hemingway: The Final Years (Hardcover)

Michael S. Reynolds' "Hemingway: The Final Years" is excellent and a worthy addition to any library, as are the previous volumes. I have read every Hemingway biography (I even have such paperback quickies as HEMINGWAY: LIFE AND DEATH OF A GIANT and THE PRIVATE HELL OF HEMINGWAY that were published shortly after Papa's death) since my father, twenty-two years ago, gave me a copy of Carlos Baker's 1967 authorized biography (which I also recommend; it gives you the a great overview of Hemingway's life and work and is very readable), and I have found Reynolds biographies to be wonderful and informative.