There are obviously no shortage of biographies about Ernest Hemingway. This particular biography takes a slightly different route, in that it uses his relationships with various women to tell his life story. It starts with his first love in Italy and ends with his 4th wife, Mary. In between we meet not only three other wives but other lovers, muses and females who played an important role in his life. Equal time is given to each wife, regardless of the length of the marriage at issue. (Very little attention is given to his children from those wives.) As a biography of Hemingway, I would not recommend it but if you are looking at a biography focusing on solely his relationships with the women who influenced his life and writing, you could do worse.

When I was a preteen I saw the movie The Sun Also Rises. I was moved but I didn’t understand it. A few years later I purchased the novel and read it several times. Then, in 2014 I read it again, and I finally ‘got’ it. It is about war and trauma. And of course, a woman. There is always a woman in his novels. But even she has been shattered by the war, losing a fiancée to the war and encountering the war wounded while volunteering as a nurse.

I also saw the movie of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the image of Gregory Peck’s feverish recollections of his life and women haunting me.

What I didn’t realize was that all those women in Hemingway’s novels were inspired by the women he loved in life. Reading Hemingway’s Passions gave me a solid overview of his entire life and work. Sindelar explains, “Ernest’s personal experiences became the content of his writing,” his quest for adventure and new experiences usually bound up with a new love interest. He believed that men were wired to seek new sexual partners, even if he wished he had never been lured away from his first wife, Hadley.

Hemingway came from a supportive but conservative home in Chicago who vacationed at a primitive cabin in Northern Michigan. Like so many, an idealistic Hemingway went to war and returned broken in body and heart. The injured nineteen-year-old fell for his nurse. He turned her into the love interest in A Farewell to Arms, altering reality to sexual fulfillment via fiction.

But the book came later. He was totally flattened by her rejection. He wandered about Up North Michigan and went to Toronto before, at a Chicago party, he saw the older Hadley and fell for her. They married and moved to Paris where they hobnobbed with Gertrude Stein and the writers and artists she christened The Lost Generation. Ezra Pound influenced his iconic writing style.

In Spain, Hemingway meet Lady Duff Twysden who became Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. But the woman he became involved with was the wealthy heiress and journalist Pauline Pfeiffer. To marry her, he converted to Catholicism, thereby able to annul his marriage to Hadley. The newlyweds settled in Key West where he wrote many of his novels.

After his father’s suicide in 1928, Hemingway had to support his ex, his wife, his mother, three siblings, and his sons. You would think that all this responsibility would ground him. But, leaving his pregnant wife, he went abroad. On the way home met Jane Mason who lived in Cuba. Their friendship turned into another affair after Pauline’s difficulties giving birth resulted in restricted sexual activity.

A trip to Africa with Pauline became The Green Hills of Africa and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Hemingway became disgusted by the rich, including Pauline, and he needed a new adventure. So he was off to the Spanish Civil War, where he met the intrepid journalist Martha Gellhorn. If he was anti-fascist after observing Mussolini reading a dictionary upside down for a photo op, he was determedly anti-fascist witnessing the war now called “the dress rehearsal for World War II.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls came out of this experience; I have my grandfather’s copy on my shelf.

Hemingway pressured Martha into marriage, just two weeks after Pauline divorced him for desertion. Then, he was unhappy that Martha continued her active career instead of staying home and taking care of him. Plus, she was getting the good stories and he was jealous. They divorced. Hemingway had meet another journalist, the married Mary Welsh Monks, telling her he wanted to marry her at first meeting.

Mary was willing to put Hemingway’s needs first, caring for him and their Cuba house and his kids, even putting up with his infatuation with a teenager late in life. The teen ended up another heroine in a novel, but not in his bed. That novel was a failure.

The Old Man and the Sea, another Hemingway book on my teenage book shelf, didn’t have a female love interest, but garnered a Pulitzer Prize.

Political strife forced Hemingway and Mary to leave Cuba. By this time, Hemingway was struggling with health and mental health issues, underdoing shock therapy which disrupted his ability to write. Mary tried to prevent his suicide attempts, but he finally succeeded. She abily managed his literary estate, getting permission to return to Cuba for the papers they had left behind.

The stories of all the women is wrapped up at the end of the book.

Photographs, scanned documents, Hemingway’s letters and relationship with Marlene Dietrich, and a timeline complete the book.

It is a short biography, quickly read, both entertaining and enlightening. I especially appreciated the encapsulation of the novels, detailing how Hemingway used the people and events of his life for fiction.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

Thank you to Net Galley and Globe Pequot/Lyons Press for the chance to read and review this book. All opinions are my own.
I enjoyed this book about Hemingway. It was a little different because it focused on the women in his life and how they influenced his work and his thinking. He was married four times as well as becoming friends with a lot of other women along the way. It was a fast-moving biography with lots of details. I liked the way the author included photographs, personal letters and quotation from his work to tell the story. I think the use of his own words gives the reader a better sense of what kind of man he was. Recommend to all Hemingway fans!

I enjoyed this book, Ms Sindelar uses Hemmingway's life and letters to construct a narrative that highlights both the highs and lows of his life and the impact he had on other. While many of the facts are re-told from other books, i felt that this book condensed those other books and made for a quick and enjoyable read.

This was very interesting even though I already knew a lot about Hemingway! The non fiction book showed very clearly Hemingway 's passions : women , war and death. It also focuses on moral issues faced by Ernest such as courage, duty as regards fighting. Comparing various wars, he will refine/redefine such concepts leading to some of the best novels I have ever read. A great informative book!
I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley and I have voluntarily written an honest review.