Legendary writer, peerless war correspondent, avid sportsman - and a suicide at the age of 61 - Hemingway lived a life profound in its accomplishments and tragic in its personal implications. From the salons of Paris to the corridas of Spain, from the revolutions in Cuba to a near-fatal safari in th African bush, he both recorded and helped shape an era of artistic achievement and untoward violence. This biography challenges the image that Ernest Hemingway fashioned for himself - an image created by the stories he told his family and friends, fostered in his novels and expanded upon in his own writings. It includes characters as diverse as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway's father and mother, and his four wives. James Mellow is the author of Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Times and Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.