We can all agree that something happened to Hemingway, sometime in the 1930's. It's hard to pin down exactly when and where, but he wasn't the same writer after A Farewell To Arms. He started to believe in his own legend, never a good move, especially when most of it he made up himself. This biography of Hemingway has a revealing letter that perhaps provides some clue as to what wrong - after getting his boat, the Pilar, Hemingway wanted to chuck the writing gig and become a fisherman.
Perhaps he should have. He might have been happier, and we would have been spared the slow descent of a great young writer into a mediocre old one. And, perhaps the people around him would have been happier as well - his wives (second, third and fourth) and his children, especially his youngest son, Gregory, who died in a jail cell in October 2001.
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