Hemingway biography jeffrey meyers
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623-624) and index. There was also some great advice for writers which I found more than relevant:
"From the beginning of his career Hemingway sought to base his fiction on reality, but he tried to distill the essence of the experience so that what he made up was truer than what we remembered. As noted in the book, "In 1961, the year of his own suicide, Hemingway wrote to Carlos Baker that Fenton had set a bad example to other biographers by jumping to his death from a hotel window, and wondered what he had been thinking about on the way down. (p.
The book provides loads on insight into the events in the writer's life that impacted his writing and inspired his characters, particularly excellent for understanding his short stories.
There was a lot of irony in Hem's life and the over-shadowing of his father's suicide tainted much of his writing and, of course, his ultimate destiny.
Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. The vignettes from In Our Time illustrated his new asthetic theory: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.
Things aren't that way. . . He assiduously courted that fame and it was among the things that eventually undid him.
Hemingway: A Biography
HarperCollins Publishers, $27.5 (644pp) ISBN 978-0-06-015437-0
There was a cartoon famous some 35 years ago that depicted an editor returning a manuscript to a crestfallen author: ""But you have a wonderful style; Hemingway's, isn't it?'' In this critical bigraphy, Meyers, a professor at the University of Colorado and author of some 20 books, charts the life of the man who created that ``wonderful,'' innovative style imitated by so many over the decades.
Hemingway himself was flamboyant and hugely personable, and, in his prime, had the good looks of a movie star. He attractively combined hedonism and hard work, was a great teacher of ritual and technique, carried an aura of glamour and power. It is possible that he carried a weight of anxiety with him that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.'' Meyers's biography in no way replaces Carlos Baker's massive 1969 achievement, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, but it is marvelously rich in new, revealing anecdote and it deservedly stands beside Baker's as a saltier and less discreet companion volume.
A model for all writers that followed him, despite peaks and valleys in his writing quality overall, but what a fascinating and intense life! The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."
And also,
"His basic principles of writing have been extremely influential:
Study the best literary models.
Master your subject through experience and reading.
Work in disciplined isolation.
Begin early every morning and concentrate for several hours a day.
Begin by reading everything you have written from the start or, if engaged in a long book, from the last chapter.
Write slowly and deliberately.
Stop writing when things are going well and you know what will happen next so that you have sufficient momentum to continue the next day.
Do not discuss the material while writing about it.
Do not thing about writing when you are finished for the day but allow your subconscious mind to ponder it.
Work continuously on a project once you start it.
Keep a record of your daily progress.
Make a list of titles after you have completed the work." (page 113)
And again, in a letter to his father:
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not just to depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive.
It was virtually a new language, seemingly simplistic but carefully forged and intensely suggestive.
Also issued online. of plates :
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He portrayed the heroic possibilities and tragic consequences of war, the psychic dislocation in battle and the stoicism of survival.He seemed a bit obsessed with death and the idea of suicide. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.