Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961) enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world.

Verna Kale's new, narrative portrait of Hemingway challenges some of the long-held assumptions about his life and craft, and re-examines the writer, sportsman and celebrity through the stages of his long and varied career.

The book traces Hemingway's adventures as a Red Cross volunteer in the First World War, his apprenticeship as an expatriate poet in 1920s Paris, his navigation of the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, his fraught relationships with his four wives - and with his own celebrity - and his decades-long, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to write a masterwork that would explode the boundaries of the American novel.

About the Author
Verna Kale is Visiting Assistant Professor in Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia, and has contributed essays to the Hemingway Review. She is the editor of Teaching Hemingway and Gender (forthcoming).