Reynolds's "masterpiece in the making" ("Library Journal") concludes with a rich and sympathetic portrayal of Nobel Prize recipient Hemingway's final 20 years.
Published to coincide with the release of the HBO film Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. Michael Reynolds was the supreme biographer of Ernest Hemingway. HBO’s film concentrates on Hemingway’s years with his third wife, the adventurous journalist Martha Gellhorn. This book brings together Reynolds’s Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years.
Drawn from newly available letters, recently published memoirs, interviews, and previously classified documents, a portrait of the author concentrates on Hemingway's last years
Drawing on a wealth of new material and period documents, the author of The Young Hemingway traces Ernest Hemingway's development from promising young novelist to a master during the thirties, illuminating his literary evolution and the people, places, and times that influenced it.
In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice, Across the River and into the Trees stands as Hemingway's statement of defiance in response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. Hemingway's last full-length novel published in his lifetime, it moved John O'Hara in The New York Times Book Review to call him “the most important author since Shakespeare.”
Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic. "Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together. Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War.