The Hemingway Log

Book excerpt: Few if any writers have made a mark as broad and deep as Ernest Hemingway, whose life and work—and even image—continue to permeate American culture more than a half-century after his death in 1961. And never has there been a chronology of the writer’s life and times as comprehensive, detailed, and useful as The Hemingway Log. For more than a dozen years, Brewster Chamberlin “has been compiling and wonderfully annotating and continuously updating what amounts to almost a daybook calendar of Hemingway’s life,” as author Paul Hendrickson noted in his acclaimed Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. At long last available to readers and scholars, this chronology extends from the birth of Mark Twain (whose Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway said, was the source of all modern American literature) to the 2013 publication of the second volume (of a projected seventeen) of the Hemingway letters. Throughout, the events and dates that had any influence whatsoever on the writer are detailed day by day. Who won the Nobel Prize in literature each year, for instance, or the Pulitzer? What works of poetry, fiction, or drama were published? What was happening in the world and in the country, and how did it relate to Hemingway? Within this clarifying context, the chronological facts of the writer’s own life and work unfold: literary production and publishing; travels and households; activities and relevant occurrences; relations with family, friends, lovers, and enemies. Drawing on biographies, memoirs, and various Hemingway collections and websites, as well as the full range of original sources such as letters, fishing logs, notebooks, and manuscripts, The Hemingway Log presents the most extensive and accurate chronology of Hemingway’s life and times—and in the process clears up many of the inconsistencies and factual errors that riddle accounts of the writer’s life and work. Any future scholar of Hemingway will find the book not just invaluable but absolutely necessary, and any serious reader of Hemingway will find it irresistible.