The Young Hemingway [Paperback]

Michael S. Reynolds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 1998

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this, the first volume in Michael Reynolds's five-volume biography of Ernest Hemingway, he freely mimics Papa's writing style; pastiches such as the following can test even the most persevering reader's limits:

There had been things to prove to himself. Now they were done. There had been a job to do in Toronto. Now that was done. He had done the job. He had made his own way. His stories had sold to the Toronto Star. Not the stories of Italy, but newspaper stories. The real stories all came back to him. That did not matter. He had settled the question of who he was. He was a writer. When people asked, that is what he told them. If he stuck to his story, it would become true. Now he was almost home at the lake and it was summer. He was there, in the good place. He was still free. He would try not to let anything spoil the summer.

The biographical narrative itself deals chiefly with three years of Hemingway's life, from his return home in 1919 from the First World War to his departure for Paris with his first wife, Hadley, in 1921. Along the way, Reynolds uses Hemingway's conflicts with his parents over his future as an opportunity to probe into the family's past, providing rich detail on his father's depressive condition and his mother's struggle for independence. Reynolds also provides plenty of background on Hemingway's boyhood home of Oak Park, Illinois (although a brief prologue that concerns itself chiefly with the town's politics and mores is made somewhat superfluous by re-addressing the same subjects in the main narrative). While The Young Hemingway is not the best of Reynolds's undertakings from a stylistic standpoint, and probably not the most interesting period of its subject's life, Reynolds establishes a standard for detail--and restrained psychological interpretation--that is kept up throughout the series. --Ron Hogan

Review

A magnificent evocation of the difficult beginnings of Hemingway's literary career. (Maria Vargas Llosa -Voice Literary Supplement )

Informative and entertaining. (New York Times Book Review )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (June 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393317765
• ISBN-13: 978-0393317763
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #244,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reynolds speaks Hemingway fluently, January 16, 2002

By 

Lale Eskicioglu "Host of ReadLiterature.Com" (Ottawa, Ontario) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Young Hemingway (Paperback)

There are over 70 Hemingway biographies out there. You want to read one, a good one. How do you choose? You flip through the pages of a few at your local bookstore and then, relying on your intuition and luck, you pick one. Hopefully it will be the one written by Michael Reynolds. The Young Hemingway is the first in a 5 volume set. The other books in the set are The Paris Years, The Homecoming, The 1930s and The Final Years. (I ended up reading all 5. While reading this first book, it is important to keep in mind that it is only a part of a bigger story.)

This is a well-researched and well-written book (as are the other 4 in the series). Reynolds, to put everything into perspective, gives background information on the society, politics, art, culture and trends of the times. He tells us which songs are popular and which books are on the best-seller lists. All of the important events that take place in the US and in the world are mentioned. Reynolds does not miss anything that might have helped shape Hemingway or that might help us understand him and his works better. When a day is significant in Hem's life, you can be sure that Reynolds will also tell you the headlines of European and American papers' headlines of that day.

It is a very smooth flowing, easy to read book and when you are finished you know that you can't just have one, you have to read all five.

A note to the reviewer who found excessive family info (or gossip) in the first book: I think the first book, The Young Hemingway, is concentrating on the family to give us a solid background of the man, of where he is coming from. It is important to keep in mind that this is only one fifth of the whole study. The family falls to the background in following books and other "shapers" come to the foreground. It is a work that needs to be reviewed as a whole.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, Well researched, Well Written, February 24, 2000

By 

William M. Hessberg (ny) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Young Hemingway (Paperback)

Mr. Reynolds has done a first rate job on Hemingway's early years. The research is excellent, the writing is always interesting. Reynolds does a fine job of portraying Oak Park(EH's home town) at the turn of the century(1900). Hemingway's war experience is well presented. His life in Illinois and up in Michigan are well documented and portrayed in a lively manner. The personalities of his mother and father are presented in a manner that anticipates Hemingway's later problems and preoccuapations. Overall, a first rate job. One minor objection- Hemingway was a bs artist like lots of young men, and Mr. Reynolds is repetitious in his demonstration of Hemingway's falsehoods. He is a bit harsh on young Ernie. But the book deserves a top notch recommendation.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PROBABLY ONE OF THE BEST HEMINGWAY BIOGRAPHIES SO FAR...Love the way this author discusses Hemingways literary issues., September 18, 2011

By 

D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Young Hemingway (Paperback)

Of all our American authors, Earnest Hemingway is the one that probably has more biographies with his name on them than any other. As one reviewer has pointed out, as of this writing there are well over 70 biographies and endless books which I classify under "I knew Hemingway when......." If you want to study or are interested in Hemingway the man, and in this case, Hemingway the writer, then you have plenty of works to choose from. Almost all of these biographies are of one volume with Carlos Baker's, `Earnest Hemingway: A life Story' leading the pack and of course the work by A.E. Hotchner, which is a good work but Hotchner was such a Hemingway worshiper that some of his work can be called in to question and doubt, if one desires to do so.

The work being reviewed here by Michael Reynolds, "The Young Hemingway," is the first book of five volumes and the reader must be aware of this fact. While the book is fine as a stand-alone, it never-the-less tells only a small part of the full story. I feel, and this is strictly a personal opinion, that for a single volume work the one by Carlos Baker is the best. For a multivolume work, Michael Reynolds really has little competition.

This work covers Hemingway's early life, actually a three or four year period from his graduation from high school up until the time he marries Hadley Richardson, his first wife, and they depart for Paris. There are several factors in this work that distinguish it from the many other biographies.

First, this is a more scholarly work than we have been treated to in the past, yet at the same time Reynolds have given us a very readable work which could almost be classified as a page turner. His research is meticulous and when the author speculates he is the first to point this out. This is not what you would call a "popular history," yet in many ways it reads like one.

Second, Michael Reynolds quite likely has a better grasp of Hemingway's writing than any of the other biographers. He has the ability to analyze Hemingway's work, its source, its inspiration and its goals. Each step of the way as Hemingway develops and matures into what he finally became is closely examined and the whys and wherefores are covered better than anything I have read thus far. Now I grant you that I was impressed by this and there is a strong likelihood that I was personally influenced simply because Reynolds validates many of my own thoughts on the subject. Again, this is a personal thing and many may view it differently. That being said, it would be difficult to refute most of what Reynolds has written.

Third, the author has uniquely used, from time to time, Hemingway's own style of writing to tell Hemingway's story. At times the reader will wonder if Hemingway or Reynolds did the actual writing. I personally got a kick out of this. Reynolds has Hemingway's style nailed perfectly.

Forth, the author very seldom falls back on the cheap gossip which abounds around Hemingway's early life while being raised in Oak Park. There were a couple of notable exceptions to this where the author has addressed the gossip and builds a very good case in dispelling the rumors and innuendos, the primary one being related to the possibility that Hemingway's mother had a long term lesbian relationship with a young lady who was her companion, housekeeper and nurse for the children. On the other hand, the author does acknowledge that while this was quite likely far from the truth, it was never-the-less seen through the eyes of a 16 year old Hemingway and it could quite well account for the fact that Hemingway's well know fascination with lesbians he had throughout his life could quite possibly have stemmed from this.

Fifth, and this is one I was quite grateful for, Reynolds has given Hadley full credit for her influence over Hemingway's development as an author via her introducing him to real literature rather than the juvenile and popular literature at the time. Along the same line, he addresses the tremendous influence that Teddy Roosevelt's writing had over him and his development as a man, i.e. his attitudes of what a "real man" should be. This was not out of the ordinary as an entire generation of young boys was under the same influence.

Sixth, even though it is a well known fact that Hemingway had a very bad habit of embellishing stories of himself, to the point of actually lying, a fact that practically ever biographer has pointed out, he, Reynolds, points out the fact that there was a strong underlying theme of "fiction" throughout Hemingway's entire life and had he not had this tendency to embellish, he probably would not have become the great fiction writer he was. All men have a bit of this trait in them; Hemingway just took it to new heights.

Seventh, the author Reynolds has not burdened us with several chapters as most biographers have done, with the Hemingway family tree going back two or three generations. While he covers this, he does it in a way that is quite painless and blends family history skillfully into his overall story.

Eighth, the author has stressed over and over again the impact that Hemingway's relationship with his father and mother and how it affected him for the rest of his life and that aspect of his life cannot be overlooked or made light of.

Overall, so far, this is by far the best biography on the life of Earnest Hemingway I have read, and it must be noted that I have read a bunch of them. We shall see how the next four volumes go.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks