This selection of seventeen essays on the writing of Ernest Hemingway is edited by Robert W. Lewis, the President of the Hemingway Society and Chairman of the Hemingway Foundation. Commentary on Hemingway is now entering new fields with the opening of the enormously rich Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston. Lewis' selection illustrates the pluralism and richness of current research and criticism. He has divided these essays into four groupings which examine Hemingway's women characters, his relations with other writers textual and critical studies and his fiction set in Italy. These scholars bring new insight to the understanding of Hemingway's published and unpublished works and illustrate that Hemingway studies have come of age in our time.

These seventeen essays demonstrate the maturity and diversity of Hemingway studies. Built on a considerable body of criticism, they utilize revelations from manuscripts and galleys and reach out to other disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. In the first of four groupings scholars reexamine Hemingway's treatment of women and previous misconceptions of his sexual politics. Linda Patterson Miller begins with a general introduction and reassessment. Roger Stephenson concludes this four essay grouping with a provocative tour de force. The second section focuses on four very different relationships: Hemingway with Bernard Berenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers and critics. The third grouping includes four textual analyses. Ranging from intensely personal to scholarly neutral, they all illustrate the richness of current scholarship. Describing Hemingway's strong attachment to Italy, Lewis reminds his readers that Hemingway's imagination was richly nourished by this country. In the fourth and final grouping five scholars conduct a provocative exploration of Hemingway's Italy.