Even before he shot the top of his own head off, Americans had begun to wonder whether they had come to love Hemingway not wisely but too well. This suspicion had little to do with his stories and novels: it was the fiction that Hemingway and others had made of his life that held the attention - the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, 'a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.'

LRB 23 June 1988 | PDF Download