A Biographer’s Art

Abstract

Phillip Sipiora reviews Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), the first major Hemingway biography by a woman and the work of a biographer who has also written on Mailer and Henry Miller. Answering the question of why another Hemingway life is needed, Sipiora praises Dearborn for selecting key episodes to illuminate the fiction rather than chronicling every day, for her attention to gender fluidity and the cultural construction of masculinity, and for her frank treatment of Hemingway’s decline and his family’s history of trauma and suicide. He frames her method in Heideggerian hermeneutic terms.