Word: booked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...study of Hemingway's writing and sometime novelist himself-is the scholarly inheritor of Hemingway's papers. He has used the material to fashion the first solid, cohesive and convincingly authentic account of a lifetime most often presented in the past in fragments by partisan observers. The book's great additional merit is that it forces readers to take Hemingway whole. After Baker, Ernest the Good and Ernest the Bad will never again be quite so neatly, so conveniently and so misleadingly separated...
...book ends on the morning of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. He was exhausted at the time and had been under treatment for erratic blood pressure, liver ailments and acute melancholia. But, Baker implies, the tragic themes of Hemingway's writing were not contradicted but confirmed by that final act and by Hemingway's entire personal history...
...death and violence as his stories. "When asked what he is afraid of," his mother wrote of five-year-old Ernest, "he shouts out fraid a nothing."" But he felt compelled to spend half a lifetime proving it. An astonishing number of Baker's pages-and the book's rich lode of rarely seen illustrations-document the journeys Hemingway undertook to various test sites of courage: high school football in Oak Park, 111., three wars, hunting grounds from Idaho to Africa, boxing and bull rings, ski slopes, four marriage beds...
...Country. Hemingway spoke lividly of training his dogs and cats to "attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards." According to Baker, he called Scott Fitzgerald, who revered him, "a rummy and a liar with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel." Thomas Wolfe he rated as "a one-book glandular giant with the guts of three mice." Once he provoked a fight in a hotel dining room with William Saroyan, and when the poet Wallace Stevens, 20 years his senior, visited him on Key West, he left with a rather mysterious black eye. All things being equal, William Faulkner...
...fringe stand the odd-balls and yahoos, some of whom never get closer to a book than a bet but ready to light the fuses...