Remaking Modern Fiction presents Hemingway the man and Hemingway the legend and shows that in many ways the real man was more fabulous than the legend.
Critics and readers have often confused Hemingway with his heroes because his heroes go through many of the same experiences that Hemingway did. Lieutenant Henry's experiences in A Farewell to Arms seem based on Hemingway's life in World War I as an ambulance driver and an infantryman in the Italian army. Nick Adams in his short stories has a boyhood and young adulthood that seems much like Hemingway's own.
In one sense the critics and readers were right; Hemingway's heroes did appear to lead lives like Hemingway's. But the critics and readers were wrong to believe that his heroes were the same as himself, for Hemingway wrote fiction. His fiction, however, was based on the life he led. He wrote always about that life, and that life was as important to his writing as the writing was to the man.
From his cub reporting days on the Kansas City Star to the day he died, Hemingway devoted himself unceasingly to perfecting and using a style that influenced many writers, although no one ever succeeded in copying it. Simple in language and statement, this style had the rhythms of speech that ranged from the way gangsters talked to the way Spanish peasants spoke. He did not set out to remake modern fiction; he set out to make himself a style; and in so doing he did remake modern fiction.
Hemingway created much of his own legend. He was an on-the-spot correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and a reluctant correspondent but eager participant in World War II. Downed in a plane crash in Africa and rescued, he suffered serious injuries when the rescue plane crashed on takeoff. Reports of his death, like those of Mark Twain's, turned out to be "greatly exaggerated".
So vivid to the public was the picture of Hemingway fishing in mountain streams or from his own boat Pilar in the Gulf Stream; of Hemingway hunting big game; of Hemingway watching his favorite matadors in the bull ring that it seemed impossible he should ever die. He did. But the stories, the novels, the books he wrote did not. And many of the writers coming after them have written as they did because of the way he wrote.
—from the dust jacket
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