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Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life.

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Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life. By Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 201 pp. Cloth $69.95.

Linda Wagner-Martin's Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life is part of Palgrave Macmillan's "Literary Lives" series, a collection that currently totals 53 volumes dedicated to the "most admired and influential English-language authors." The introduction to the A-to-Y catalogue (Matthew Arnold to W.B. Yeats) claims that the series provides "stimulating accounts" of the writers' working lives, eschewing "traditional biography" for outlines of "the professional, publishing, and social contexts which shaped their writing."

One does not approach the book, then, expecting a comprehensive biography of Hemingway's life, nor does Wagner-Martin make pretenses to that end. She instead seems to recognize the limitations of the undertaking--how to pare down one of the most well-documented lives in American literature to a volume of 201 pages (which includes extensive notes, bibliography, and index). Wagner-Martin confronts the task by focusing the biography on what she calls an irony of Hemingway's life--that the male protagonists so often seen as his fictional embodiment are "stable personas," while the man himself is a "shape shifter"...

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