Ernest Hemingway: Living, Loving, Dying: Part Ii
The 1950s were years of triumph and decline for Hemingway, His next-to-last book, ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES, was a critical failure. Hardly had the literary obituaries dried when THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA reignited his fame and moved the Nobel Prize judges to award him “that Swedish thing.”After a plane crash in Africa, a good part of the world thought him dead, only to learn a few hours later that he was busted in several places but very much alive. But the body was failing and the corners in the back of Hemingway’s mind were darkening in the period covered in this final of two ATLANTIC excerpts from ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORYby Carlos Baker, to be published in April by Scribner’s.