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The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels.

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The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels. By Hilary K. Justice. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.162 pp. Cloth $39.00.

Most scholars recognize Hemingway as a writer who wrote what he knew, which means he wrote what he lived--sometimes even as he was living it. Many scholars also recognize how readers too often misread Hemingway's texts, drawing direct parallels between Hemingway's personal life and the narrative life so as to perpetuate biographical fallacies that ignore artistic nuance. Hemingway himself, as Hilary K. Justice argues in The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the Posthumous Novels, came to understand that fame defined his reading public's expectations for his work, a recognition that then inhibited his ability to write truly, or truthfully. This idea that "fame became of him" is not a new insight. What is stunningly new about Justice's book is her recognition that Hemingway's conflict between his private and public selves (what she calls the "Writer" who writes Personal books versus the "Author" who writes what people see as Authentic books) determined the overarching stylistic and thematic configurations of his life's work (which she defines in the aggregate as the "Hemingway Text").

As Hemingway's fame escalated following the publication in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises (which thrust him into the public arena as an Author), he began to devise artistic innovations that would allow him to mine the mother-lode of personal material that had inspired his stories written between 1923 and 1927. He would side-step personal exposure as a writer to the degree that he discovered ways to embed and perhaps to deflect the...

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