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Early in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, biographer James R. Mellow recounts an episode from the writer's apprentice years in which the then young journalist kept Kansas City Star colleague Ted Brumback awake for the better part of the night with drunken readings from Robert Browning. When Brumback woke up at four the next morning, Hemingway was still talking, but sailed through the work day that followed with seemingly no ill effects. "Sometimes I think that's the outstanding characteristic of genius," Brumback said later, "boundless energy." It was this vital energy and its subsequent translation into fiction that distinguishes Hemingway from his illustrious contemporaries. Perhaps no other writer in this century has so deliberately, and so successfully, pursued such a variety of experiences for source material.

Just recounting the significant events in Hemingway's life--the war experiences, the literary feuds, the safaris, the wives--is a major endeavor, and Mellow's ability to do so fluently and concisely in this relatively compact work, and with depth of analysis, is one of the book's outstanding qualities. Mellow's extensive experience with Hemingway's contemporaries (having written both Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company and a biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Invented Lives) proves invaluable to him in this project. He has the background both to cover the Paris of the 1920s, where Hemingway honed his craft, and to make the necessary critical assessment of the writer's time-line, which Hemingway conflated and re-created repeatedly in later life. Mellow's sensitive appreciation of Hemingway's prose doesn't blind him to a clear-sighted assessment of the writer's literary weaknesses and failures. Nor does his evident affection for his subject hinder him from detailing the manipulations, grudges, and breaches of faith that Hemingway was capable of in his ambitious drive to be the Great American Writer. Mellow is particularly good at demonstrating how Hemingway's life, as much as his fiction, was a conscious creation. The title of this biography is, we discover, largely an ironic one, as the writer's tendency to mix truth and fantasy in his writing and his own life was to have vast consequences, for his friends and lovers, for himself, and most tragically, for the literary genius that was far too often squandered in his later years. --John Longenbaugh

From Publishers Weekly
Hemingway's (1899-1961) third wife, Martha Gelhorn, bore no great affection for him, but she did cogently sum up his importance: "He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language." If true, this idea may justify the continuing proliferation of Hemingway biographies, to which Mellow has made a notable addition with this concluding volume of a trilogy devoted to the modernist writers and artists of the "lost generation" ( Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ). With two-thirds of its pages concentrating on the first 30 years of Hemingway's life, Mellow's work is especially valuable for its exploration of the influences that shaped the writer's skills--particularly the impact of Stein and Ezra Pound--and led to his becoming the 20th century's most famous author. Hemingway's pose as a literary tough guy accounted for much of his celebrity and has provided ample material for the psycho-sexual speculations of biographers--including Mellow, who examines in great detail the many instances of male bonding that accompanied Hemingway's interests and lifestyle. Mellow softens Hemingway's harsh portrait of his mother as a domineering harridan, while he acknowledges that Hemingway's unresolved feelings about his mother affected his relationships with women. Hemingway was haunted, too, by the suicide of his ineffectual but admired father, from whom he learned the "masculine" pursuits of hunting and fishing, although Mellow contends that Hemingway's fear of death obsessed him long before that devastating loss. Hemingway's hoard of private papers to which Mellow had access--character notes, outlines and early versions of now-famous stories and novels--reveal much about him; the papers provide insight, for example, into the process by which a writer transforms the ordinary stuff of life into art. Mellow devotes only a few pages to Hemingway's slow decline into the pontifications of the "Papa" period, aptly remarking that "one has to fight back the feeling that Hemingway let himself down badly." These words resonate against the image of the writer as a charismatic young man with a wide smile and big shoulders whose great promise and considerable achievements Mellow so sensitively assesses. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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First Sentence:
It must have seemed to Ernest Hemingway, as it had to his hero Harry Walden, the dying writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro " that he had come to a time when he was too tired to care much, a time without affect, a time when, facing the prospect of death, he had edged beyond pain: "For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
lonely trade, biggest bluff Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Dos Passos, New York, Gertrude Stein, Bill Smith, Max Perkins, Nick Adams, Kansas City, Red Cross, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Edmund Wilson, Bill Horne, Clarence Hemingway, Lieutenant Henry, Walloon Lake, Scott Fitzgerald, Don Stewart, Soldier's Home, World War, Grace Hemingway, Katy Smith, Big Two-Hearted River, Green Hills of Africa, Mike Strater New!
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