Picturing Hemingway - A Writer in His Time

Frederick Voss

ISBN 10: 0300079265 / ISBN 13: 9780300079265

Published by Yale University Press, New Haven, USA, 1999

About this Item

First printing, The catalogue of an exhition held the same year in Washington DC. Quarto-size, 128 pages (xiv, 114) printed on heavy stock, black-and-white illustrations throughout, some in colour; publisher's black cloth titled silver: black and half-tone dustwrapperL Fine, no marks of previous ownership' unclipped jacket. Pictures show this actual book. UK orders are post-free.

Seller Inventory # 146197

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Picturing Hemingway - A Writer in His Time
• Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven, USA
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300079265
• ISBN 13: 9780300079265
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: First edition.
• Printing: First printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • History & Biography
  • Art, Painting, Photography, Printmaking &c.
  • Fiction and some other creative writing.

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of more than 70 portraits of Ernest Hemingway and those around him, commemorating his life and career. The drawings, paintings and photographs are accompanied by two essays, one on the man as a literary icon and the other examining his life in the light of various portraits.

Review

He wrote some of the best and most influential American prose of the 20th century. But even a cursory look at the marvellous photos, drawings and paintings assembled for Picturing Hemingway, honouring Ernest Hemingway's centennial reminds readers that the author's enduring fame has at least as much to do with his riveting good looks, virile charisma and macho lifestyle. This book of photographs is buoyed by intelligent essays by curator Frederick Voss and Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, that serve as cogent mini-biographies of the man. They cover all the salient points: the great fiction, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea; the four wives, subservient Hadley Richardson and Mary Welsh and Martha Gelhorn, the feminist exception; the energetic outdoor and public life that couldn't stave off bouts of depression that prompted his suicide in 1961. All the famous pictures are here: the 1934 shot of a cocky, mustachioed Hemingway kneeling with the horns of his kill from an African safari. The classic 1957 Karsh portrait of the writer as bearded éminence grise in a turtleneck sweater. But he isn't visible in the most haunting of all--a photo of his funeral, with a small group of mourners huddled against desolate hills and a pitch-black Idaho sky--an image whose existential starkness equals that of Hemingway's masterpieces. --Wendy Smith