ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All the opinions here are mine.

Below is a condensed list of what I’ve read, consulted, glanced at, disagreed with, or been inspired by:

First, the standard books. Among them the earliest biography is the family-blessed Hemingway by Carlos Baker. Michael Reynolds spent his writing life on Hemingway with five volumes; his Hemingway: the 1930s is the best. These standards include Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway, Peter Griffin’s Less Than Treason and Along With Youth, and biographies by Kenneth Schuyler Lynn and James Mellow, and Hemingway in Africa: the Last Safari by Christopher Ondaatje.

For my co-writer Janice Tidwell and I on the Richard Attenborough-directed, Sandra Bullock-starring film In Love and War, about Ernest’s young crush on his American nurse, we found invaluable Hemingway’s Women by Bernice Kert. Behind Islands in the Stream by Thomas Fensch is a fun read, reproducing in all their loopy paranoia the FBI agents’ reports on Hemingway in Cuba. Certain essays in Hemingway and Women, edited by Broer and Holland, are suggestive, especially Linda Patterson Miller’s “In Love With Papa.”

Aside from these books, I took heart from essays by different writers. Nadine Gordimer on “Hemingway’s Expatriates,” E.L. Doctorow’s “Braver Than We Thought,” Joan Didion’s “Life and Letters” column in 9 Nov ’98 issue of The New Yorker, and George Plimpton’s interview with Hemingway in the January 1959 issue of Horizon magazine, reprinted in Paris Review #21. See anything written by Kenneth Kinnamon on Hemingway’s politics. Joseph Flora’s examination of the Nick Adams stories helped me understand how the stories stand up as an almost separate autobiographical novel. I’ve also found useful an article in Modern American Poetry by Cary Nelson on the Spanish Civil War. Special mention must be awarded to a terrific book, Hemingway’s Boat, by Paul Hendrickson. It’s a great piece of journalism and empathy.

There’s also a mass of writing by or about the Hemingway family. By far the most interesting is Gigi’s Papa. But also A Strange Tribe by Gigi’s son John; Running With the Bulls by Gigi’s wife Valerie; My Brother Ernest Hemingway by Leicester, and Ernie by his favorite sister, Madelaine. And anything written by his companion and faithful Boswell, A.E. Hotchner, who was with Hemingway in his last days. I’ve already mentioned Mary Welsh’s How it Was.

There is a Hemingway Society that you can join for $25 (students), $30 (retirees), and $40 (regular). Various student or readers’ guides to Hemingway by Arthur Waldhorn, Lisa Tyler, Paul Smith, Ron Weber, Harold Bloom and others can be good introductions (even when I disagree with some of their opinions).

Special mention to Shmoop, a sharply written free internet blog aimed at students. Dependable if you have to write an essay or pass a test.

Rose Marie Burwell’s Hemingway: the Postwar Years deals with his four posthumously published books edited by others. I’m big on audiobooks. The most listenable narrator is Stacy Keach on the Nick Adams stories. If you look for it on YouTube, you can also hear Hemingway himself promoting Across the River and Into the Tress.

If I’ve left anything out, my apologies.