Ernest Hemingway created a style of writing that captivated a generation. Owing as much to music as it did to literature, it had a tonality that resonated like a drumbeat. Its hypnotic, incantatory nature was birthed under the mentoring eyes of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce during his literary apprenticeship and buffeted with the journalistic machismo of the hard-living, hard-drinking man of action he became afterwards. Despite the acres of words that have been written by and about him, Hemingway continues to elude biographers with his complexity. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, said he was more complex than geometry. Aubrey Malone captures him in all his guises here—from boxer to braggart, hunter to hero, fisherman to ‘dangerous’ friend. In the end, when he bagged his last trophy with a self-administered bullet to the head, he went against the ‘grace under pressure’ credo that had defined him for so much of his life. Ernest Hemingway: Flawed Genius investigates the man behind the myth, a writer who was a mystery even to himself.

Born in the west of Ireland, Aubrey Malone was educated at University College, Dublin, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy. He followed this with an MA in English, in which he majored in the literary style of Ernest Hemingway. Malone was a teacher for ten years, before becoming a freelance journalist with various newspapers and magazines. He has written over fifty books, including the best-selling The Cynic’s Dictionary (Prion). He works predominantly in non-fiction, though he has published two novels and a few collections of poetry and short stories. This is his second biography of Hemingway, his first having been published by Robson Books in 1999.