This biography of Ernest Hemingway draws on a wide range of previously untapped material and offers particular insight into the private demons that both inspired and tormented him.

"Mary V. Dearborn's is the first full biography of Hemingway in more than fifteen years, the first to be written by a woman, the first to fully explore the causes of his suicide and to substantially deepen our understanding of the man, the artist, the self-created larger-than-life force who became Ernest Hemingway. Drawing on newly available materials--among them, the vast collection of papers left behind when Hemingway fled Cuba in 1960; his medical records; his complete FBI file detailing his wartime experience; the newly opened files of the KGB; the papers of his mistress, and those of his sister revealing the profound turmoil of the Hemingway family, as well as the previously overlooked letters of his mother, Grace, opera singer and painter, whose startling and illuminating correspondence reveals her decades-long romantic attachment to a woman while married to Ed Hemingway--Dearborn gives us Hemingway the man who found it difficult to give and receive love and maintain friendships, unless it was 'all for Hemingway.'"--Jacket.

Dearborn's biography of Hemingway explores the causes of his suicide, and deepens our understanding of the man, the artist, the self-created larger-than-life force who became Ernest Hemingway. We see the development of his writing; his emergence as a startlingly contemporary figure-- not least in gender experimentation and sexual role-playing. And his four marriages are examined as reflections of how he saw himself.