"The most convincing rendering of Hemingway I have yet read"-Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times. "Fame", "Money", "Sport", "Politics", "War", "Love", "Sex", "Friendship", "Religion", "Art", "Mastery", and "Death" are the chapter titles in this exploration of the career of the enigmatic Ernest Hemingway- he of the swaggering masculinity, the famous novels, the Nobel Prize, and the hidden weaknesses. Severely wounded during World War I and shaken by his father's suicide, Hemingway exorcised his fear of death by pursuing danger in the form of boxing matches, bullfights, war, and safaris. In the 1920's in Paris, where he was advised by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, he became the most promising of the expatriate writers, publishing The Sun Also Rises, Men Without Women, and A Farewell to Arms. Later, apotheosized, he was America's first authentic literary celebrity because he was the first to achieve great fame and glamour in the age of mass communications. Setting out "to discover and record what Ernest Hemingway thought on a variety of subjects.....and then, from these disparate fragments, to construct a mosaic of his mind and personality," Scott Donaldson combines the objectivity of the biographer with the interpretations of the critic. What emerges is an unforgettable picture of the Young Midwesterner who, by force of will, created and almost to the end sustained his own idealized image. "The first fresh news we've had in years about the play between the actual man and his work."-Wilfrid Shaeed, The New York Review of Books"-Publisher