National "Best Books 2009" Award Winner in Biography: Historical category - USA Book News

When Ernest Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, presenters called him “one of this epoch’s great molders of style,” praising his vivid dialogue and journalistic eye for “robust details to accumulate and take on momentous significance.”

But even the Swedish Academy could not separate Hemingway the writer from Hemingway the adventurer. They also cited his “manly love of danger and adventure, with a natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death.”

From the 1920s until his death in 1961, “Papa” Hemingway was a larger-than-life literary figure whose everyday exploits became legendary. He was a friend of celebrities, a war correspondent, journalist, renowned big-game hunter, record-setting saltwater angler, and hard-drinking brawler whose reputation preceded him. Though Hemingway was and remains an American icon, he was also first and foremost a human being, as these striking black-and-white photos remind.

About the Author:

James Plath is the co-author of Remembering Ernest Hemingway (Ketch & Yawl Press, 1999) and former director of the Hemingway Days Writers’ Workshop & Conference in Key West, Florida. A member of the Hemingway Society, he was invited twice to lecture at the Museo Ernest Hemingway, the author’s former residence in Cuba. He is chair and Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he received the university’s highest teaching award in 2004.