In this compelling biography, Peter Griffin draws on a wealth of previously unpublished material--including numerous letters and five of Hemingway's early short stories that appear in their entirety--to trace the formative years of one of America's most celebrated and influential authors. Along with Youth examines in richer detail than any previous account Hemingway's midwestern childhood, his relations with his parents, his journalistic apprenticeship, and his experiences as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy during World War I. It sheds new light on his wartime romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, his first love (and a model for the character of Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms), as well as on the circumstances surrounding his wounding and convalescence. It closes with Hemingway on the brink of the literary career that would bring him worldwide fame.
The five short stories--"The Mercenaries," "Crossroads," "Portrait of an Idealist in Love," "The Ash Heel's Tendon," and "The Current"--reveal that the Hemingway vision and style preceded the 1920s, his Paris years with Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. The book also contains many other newly uncovered documents--including letters written by Ernest to his closest friend, Bill Horne, before and after the Kurowsky love affair--which provide a rich new perspective on Hemingway's emotional development and his beginnings as a writer. Jack Hemingway, Ernest's son by his first wife, Hadley Richardson, made his mother's complete correspondence available to Griffin and also contributed a foreword in which he writes, "[Griffin] has shown me insights into my own father's character and behavior I would not have thought possible in view of the time lapse between Hemingway's death and the research he accomplished."
This is the first installment of a projected three-volume life which promises to be the definitive Hemingway biography for this generation.
Industry Reviews
"[Griffin] has shown me insights into my own father's character and behavior I would not have thought possible in view of the time lapse between Hemingway's death and the research he accomplished."--Jack Hemingway
"Griffin's book provides a bewildering and highly satisfying richness of incident....His scholarship is thorough and his involvement with his subject is so complete and so creative that the reader cannot help murmuring with approval and enlightenment at page after page."--James Dickey
"A wonderful and intimate book....It brings to life the young Hemingway with all his charm, vitality, good looks, passionate dedication to writing, like nothing else I've ever read about the man."--Raymond Carver, The New York Times Book Review
"A wonderful beginning...[to] a three-volume biography."--Ward Just, Virginia Quarterly Review
"One of the most purely attractive biographies I have ever read...A wonderful beginning...[to] a three-volume biography."--Ward Just, Virginia Quarterly Review
"[Griffin] has shown me insights into my own father's character and behavior I would not have thought possible in view of the time lapse between Hemingway's death and the research he accomplished."--Jack Hemingway
"Griffin's book provides a bewildering and highly satisfying richness of incident....His scholarship is thorough and his involvement with his subject is so complete and so creative that the reader cannot help murmuring with approval and enlightenment at page after page."--James Dickey
"A wonderful and intimate book....It brings to life the young Hemingway with all his charm, vitality, good looks, passionate dedication to writing, like nothing else I've ever read about the man."--Raymond Carver, The New York Times Book Review
"A wonderful beginning...[to] a three-volume biography."--Ward Just, Virginia Quarterly Review
"One of the most purely attractive biographies I have ever read...A wonderful beginning...[to] a three-volume biography."--Ward Just, Virginia Quarterly Review
"The most finely textured biographical work yet done on Hemingway...[Griffin] works in the service of the subject, and his almost boyish ingenuousness fits extraordinarily well with Hemingway's all-American story. His study has the benchmark of all fine biographies: The subject is not simply an individual, but a way of life, an era."--Bernard Oldsley, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"In Peter Griffin's Along With Youth...the biographer documents [Hemingway's virtues] with contagious devotion. [He] writes in a clear, pleasant style, and knowns how to narrate in a subtle fashion. The result is that the reader forms his own very vivid image of Hemingway's early years."--Mario Vargas Llosa, The Villlage Voice
"Griffin's biography is the best in years, and when completed could be the best ever written on Hemingway."--Leonard Butts, Studies in the Novel
"Along With Youth adds immeasurably to our understanding of the complex, systemic broodings of the man of action as a lover of art."--Studies in Short Fiction
"Good book, thorough, revealing."--Jan Bakker, Utah State University
