He shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho, on the morning of July 2, 1961, with the double-barreled shotgun he had taken from the locked storage room the night before. He was sixty-one years old. He had won the Nobel Prize in Literature seven years earlier and had been unable to write a sentence he believed in for the last two years of his life. The man who had made the simple declarative sentence into the most powerful instrument of American prose was sitting in a room in Idaho unable to write a simple declarative sentence he could stand behind.He is Ernest Hemingway. And he invented himself.The Man Who Invented Himself: Ernest Hemingway is not a conventional biography. It is a literary novel about the construction of an identity - the most deliberate and most complete act of self-creation in the American literary tradition, the project that produced simultaneously the prose style that changed the language and the performance of the life that the prose style expressed. The man and the work were the same project in different mediums. When the work became impossible, the man ended.The book follows the full arc of the invention. Oak Park and the physician father and the musician mother and the specific respectability that the rebellion against it organized for the rest of the career. Italy in 1918 - the mortar fragment and the machine gun bullets and the wound and Agnes von Kurowsky and the first great damage. Paris in 1921 - Hadley and the poverty and the wood fire and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and the discipline of the short sentence and the concrete noun and the iceberg that showed one-eighth and trusted the reader with the seven-eighths below.The Sun Also Rises and the fame at twenty-six. A Farewell to Arms and the thirty-nine endings. The bullfight and the African safari and the Spanish Civil War and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cuba and the Pilar and the marlin in the Gulf Stream and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize. The four wives - Hadley the Paris wife, Pauline the Key West wife, Martha the war wife, Mary the Cuba wife. The friendships made and the friendships used and the friendships discarded. The father who shot himself in 1928. The drinking and the concussions and the plane crashes and the electroconvulsive therapy that damaged the memory that the writing required. The morning in Ketchum.The book enters the consciousness of the man inside the performance - the man who knew the code was also a performance, who understood that the grace under pressure concealed the fear under the grace, who built the identity that the world received as Ernest Hemingway and who could not in the end find the man inside the identity. It is the story of what it costs to become the thing you invented. It is the first book in The Legend Series. Read more
