Ernest Hemingway

This Literary Life tells the story of Hemingway the writer by concentrating on four periods of his best work, shaped in part by study of the correspondence between him and his four wives–and in the case of Mary Welsh, his last wife, of her diary and her autobiography. Focus falls on the Hadley Richardson period (In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises), the Pauline Pfeiffer years (A Farewell to Arms), the Martha Gellhorn period (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and the last (The Old Man and the Sea).

LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of more than forty books on American writers and genres – among them Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, John Dos Passos, and Sylvia Plath. The recipient of awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, she has been a Bunting Institute fellow and the President of the Hemingway Foundation. Among recent books are: William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway, a biography of Gertrude Stein, and her co-edited encyclopaedia, The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. She has also written Sylvia Plath, A Biography (1988), Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999/2003) and, very recently, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald 2004).