By-Line

Description

A selection of Hemingway's best prose written for newspapers and magazines between 1920 and 1956. Ernest Hemingway's literary apprenticeship was served in journalism, a career that he pursued for over four decades. From his early work as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in Europe during the 1920s, through his inimitable articles for Esquire and his first-hand reports of the Spanish Civil War, to the mellow, ironic chronicle of his last African adventures, few correspondents have produced a more impressive body of work. By-Line presents a fascinating and revealing selection of Hemingway's journalism, and charts the development of one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

Reconciling literature and action, he fulfilled for all writers, the sickroom dream of leaving the desk for the arena, and then returning to the desk. He wrote good and lived good, and both activities were the same. -- Anthony Burgess