By Force of Will

Ernest Hemingway became the highest-paid writer of his generation. His spare style and ability to work biographical details of his own life in his prose, both fiction and journalism, gained followers around the world.

In a concise yet detailed portrait, Scott Donaldson uses his life and words to summarise the life of an author who remains widely read and admired, in spite of his many personal flaws.

Born in America, Hemingway served in Italy as a soldier, which gave him inspiration for his first success, A Farewell to Arms. He lived in Spain for several years, chronicling the Spanish Civil War and writing many books.

Donaldson quotes letters from Hemingway to authors such as John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford and F Scott Fitzgerald, placing him in the canon of American authors of the twentieth century.

Among many themes which were central to Hemingway’s life were his obsessions with money, fame, war, love and sport. Donaldson concludes that Hemingway was a religious writer as well as one obsessed with sex and death, and there is an interesting precis of the renowned, sparse Hemingway style.

Donaldson’s biography is a useful addition to books about American writers and why their world views were important to understanding the world in a time of war and upheaval.

“An often illuminating and constantly fascinating mosaic of Ernest Hemingway’s mind and personality.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Donaldson’s skill is really a rare and fine art. Everyone who is interested in twentieth-century fiction or in the art of biography or in the mysterious relationship between the temperament of an artist and the work he produces should have By Force of Will within arm’s reach. In its way it is a masterpiece.” — Walter Sullivan, The Sewanee Review

“Not the least of its virtues is the way in which it allows its reader to play along with a masterly scholarly detective.” — The San Francisco Sunday Examiner

Scott Donaldson has been a leading literary biographer for over fifty years. His subjects included John Cheever and Winfield Townley Scott, and both the authors named in Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. His 2015 book is about the genre of literary biography itself.

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