Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as 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.
Published posthumously, this account of Hemingway's early years as a struggling writer in Paris in the 1920s may well have undergone further revision had Hemingway not taken his own life. Yet it was the best and most heartfelt work he had done for years, a return to the form of the early stories and the first novels. It tells the story of the sweet innocence of his first years in the Rue Moufftard with his wife, the literary friendships, the cafes and the delight which he enjoyed: both in the city and in discovering his own voice. Anyone who loves Paris will enjoy it and anyone who has affection or respect for Hemingway's work will find it deeply moving. (Kirkus UK)