Product Description

The concluding volume of Reynolds' biograpy covers the last 20 years in Hemingway's life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #596078 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
If one had to choose just one of Michael Reynolds's five volumes on Hemingway, The Final Years would probably be the best choice. Beginning with the fanfare surrounding the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the eve of the Second World War and ending with Hemingway's suicide in 1961, the book puts all that had come before into perspective even as it probes these last two decades of its subject's life. The amount of detail is staggering--and sometimes, particularly in the case of his troubled fourth marriage to Mary Welsh, painfully discomfiting. (Long before Mary interrupts a conversation between Hem and Lauren Bacall to show Bacall a bullet she keeps for anybody who makes a move on her husband, the reader has figured out that the marriage was not exactly happy.) The sections on Hemingway's wartime exploits, both in Cuba as a volunteer U-boat hunter and in Europe as a correspondent, are fascinating. But even in these moments--hell, even when he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes--Hemingway was subject to what he called "black ass" bouts of depression, an inherited condition that (as Reynolds notes) wasn't helped by his drinking or his tendency to put himself into dangerous situations in which he could suffer yet another severe concussion. Reynolds has traced the great writer's psychological decline so thoroughly that, when Hemingway puts the shotgun in his mouth in the final chapter, it is not as if the expected conclusion has finally arrived; rather, the reader has been made to feel an even deeper sense of the inevitability of the act. --Ron Hogan

Michael Greenberg, The Times Literary Supplement
"...the journey through Hemingway's sudden, self-parodic fearlessness in the forties, to the depths of his paranoid depression near the time of his suicide in 1961 makes for riveting material."

Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph
"Reynolds is the kind of biographer any writer might wish to have: intelligent, sympathetic, truthful. His book reads very well, and is moving."

Customer Reviews

An excellent biography, although by no means definitive
Michael S. Reynolds' "Hemingway: The Final Years" is excellent and a worthy addition to any library, as are the previous volumes. I have read every Hemingway biography (I even have such paperback quickies as HEMINGWAY: LIFE AND DEATH OF A GIANT and THE PRIVATE HELL OF HEMINGWAY that were published shortly after Papa's death) since my father, twenty-two years ago, gave me a copy of Carlos Baker's 1967 authorized biography (which I also recommend; it gives you the a great overview of Hemingway's life and work and is very readable), and I have found Reynolds biographies to be wonderful and informative.

The Acclaimed Biographical Series Draws To A Worthy Close
It's difficult now to explain to a high school Junior reading THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA why Hemingway is still important. This is because we have so thoroughly digested him. He seems raw in his pure form.

But perhaps the strangest Hemingway fact is that there are more books ABOUT him than there are BY him. As a stylist, we have learned his lessons. As a flawed icon, he has much to teach us.

This is why, perhaps, biographies of America's most famous writer still tend to sell well. Well enough even to merit Michael Reynold's five volume study, which is brought to completion with HEMINGWAY: THE FINAL YEARS.

With this volume, Reynolds has finally replaced Carlos Baker as the definitive Hemingway biographer. And why not? The series has featured authentic scholarship plus a tone of fairness, and an occasional surprise.

It has also been very well written. My personal favorite is HEMINGWAY: THE 1930s--perhaps not Hemingway's most productive time, but Reynold's masterpiece.

THE FINAL YEARS almost measures up. Dealing with the last two decades of Hemingway's life (which, in spite of the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes, can only be described as disastrous), Reynolds effectively traces a brilliant talent shot to hell by depression, drugs, and alcoholism. Along the way, he deftly sketches in the "supporting cast": Martha, the independent third wife; Mary, her long-suffering successor; the sons Jack, Patrick, and Gregory; and the important flirtations Adriana and Valerie. Hemingway's final descent into suicidal depression has never been more grippingly told.

The book's one flaw is its abrupt ending. Following the suicide, Reynolds tidies up with a one page epilogue, a rapid "over-and-out" summary that leaves his reader cold. In a biography of five volumes, you might expect a discussion of the aftermath, the funeral, the posthumous works, and the tragedy of yet another suicide (Jack's daughter Margaux). Instead, one must refer to Jeffrey Meyers' reissued HEMINGWAY (1985) for these sort of details.

But this is a small problem in an otherwise superior foray into Hemingway biography, a field Reynolds can now feel he leads.

Brilliant
The story of Hemingway's last years lets you enter a world of desillusion, faked grandeur and, ultimately, madness.

It seems as if the reader was present at the scenes which are brilliantly depicted by Reynolds.

Getting to know the life of Hemingway lets you add a supplementary dimension to the reading of his works.