Customer Reviews

The Young Hemingway

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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.

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.

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

Reynolds does a superb job brining the young Hemingway to life. He gives us all we would expect from Hemingway in the early years: the Oak Park family troubles, the world of Upper Michigan, and most important of all, the genesis of Hemingway's lifelong penchant for inventing or more accurately embellishing details about himself.

Reynolds sees the young Hemingway trying to model himself after various late Victorian male exemplars, like Theodore Roosevelt. When Hemingway could not quite live up to that mold, he simply embellished or lied about it; at first, he was well aware of what he was doing. Later, he used this penchant for taking an experience and exploiting it for dramatic effect in his early fiction; later, as his public persona grew and nearly swallowed Hemingway the artist, it probably scuttled him.

But in the early years, it has a poignant charm. Horatio Alger is still a model, and Hemingway strives to reach that mark.

In general, I find myself bored with most biographies. They are either overly tedious or inane in their detail, too dry or too glossy in their treatment of the subject. Michael Reynold's work here is a powerful exception. The Young Hemingway captivated me as thoroughly as a novel, and rather than finding myself skipping sections and slogging through chapters, I found myself unable to pry my eyes from the pages. Reynolds does an excellent job distilling new primary sources and a lifetime of scholarship into both an extremely readable and valuable work. I feel the essence of Hemingway in this time period is more clearly evoked than in any other biographical sketch I've read. The author is also fair in his treatment of the subject. There are no axes to grind, nor are there halos around young Hemingway; he is as real on Reynolds' page as anyone we might know, and that is one of the Reynolds' major achievements here: by the end of this work, one actually feels as if they understand some real aspects of the fabled author, the myth is stripped away, and we see something very human. This is the first book in a five part series. I'm going straight out to get the next volume.

I often find biographies to be either too tedious and scholarly on the one hand, or too fluffy on the other. This book is a scholarly pursuit at its best, yet it is still a good read, even a page turner. Author expertly balances facts from the young Hemingway's life with the history of the times, exceprts from his later work and observations about the life influenced the work. A nice, insightful story.

Reynolds is the first biographer who came out and directly stated what many others had known for years--that Hemingway had fabricated and overstated his heroic experiences in the First World War. In other words, he lied then and continued to lie about his experiences throughout the rest of his life. That Scribner's aided and abetted in the lying is reprehensible.

Those who consider this line of inquiry to be disrespectful should consider that Hemingway, more than any other writer of his time, promoted the cult of the soldier and himself as its prime exemplar. Within the military fraternity, lying about one's accomplishments in combat is disgraceful.

Those who are interested in pursuing this line of inquiry further should purchase a copy of Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (P.S.) by Paul Johnson, which contains a chapter, "The Deep Waters of Ernest Hemingway," that provides substantially more detail.

It is interesting to consider the role of the cumulative lying upon Hemingway's eventual decision to commit suicide.

For a more honest depiction of combat, consider buying George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

Biographers have tough assignments when writing books about their subjects: how to fill a reasonable number of pages with the entire life of an individual? Even someone who's not famous or historically significant would likely have enough material about their life to fill a book. Michael Reynolds as a biographer gives in, and instead concentrates on only a sliver of Hemingway's life. This decision made for good reading and one should end up understanding that it was Hemingway's earlier years, as is the case for most of us, which ended up shaping his life and death. The book also provides an interesting look at prewar American society, in particular, the growing and changing middle class. This supporting content often serves as a break from the sometimes cumbersome biographical text.