The Washington Times ran my
review of Steve Paul’s Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend.
There have been books written
about the late, great American writer Ernest Hemingway and his time as a cub
reporter on the staff of the Kansas City Star, and there have been books
written about Mr. Hemingway’s time in the Red Cross ambulance service in World
War I, but Steve Paul has written an interesting book that combines the
writer’s two dramatic experiences, both of which occurred during Mr.
Hemingway’s 18th year.
“Hemingway is quite likely
the American author of the twentieth century who has been the most argued
about, dissected, and puzzled over to this day. His life grew to mythic
proportions. His work, or much of it, remains canonical, inspiring, mysterious,
and powerfully, surprisingly relevant to humans with a heart in a world shaped
by war and anxiety. Popular culture retains him as a complicated force of
nature. Books by and about him continue to make waves and news,” Mr. Paul
writes in his introduction to “Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That
Launched an American Legend.”
Mr. Paul admits that the
book’s emphasis on a single year of a great writer’s eventful and productive
life is a “presumptuous slice of biography.”
“But what a year it was,” Mr. Paul writes.
“This was the year that Hemingway’s life of self-invention began.”
In that year Mr. Hemingway’s
path toward becoming a world-famous writer began in the busy newsroom of a
great American newspaper and would lead him to a near-death experience in a
wartime trench in Italy.
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
