Ruggedly handsome, emphatically virile, drawn to physical adventure, Ernest Hemingway not only wrote some of the twentieth century's finest fiction, he created a personal image that made him a legend. This engaging book is filled with more than seventy portraits of Hemingway and those around him, commemorating the life of one of America's most important writers. The exceptional drawings, paintings, and abundant photographs displayed and generously captioned in this volume record nearly every stage of Hemingway's life and career.

Images of Hemingway captivate. Whether sitting contemplatively or reeling in a huge game fish, he reveals a fascinating and complex personality, sometimes deliberately, at other times unconsciously. This book shows the full range of Hemingway's travels, moods, and adventures throughout his life--from a romantic oil painting by Henry Strater completed soon after Hemingway arrived in Paris in the 1920s, to a little-known photograph by Man Ray conveying Hemingway's confident self-possession before his literary talents were proven, to a Hemingway-as-journalist photograph showing the author downing a prebreakfast swig of scotch during the Spanish civil war, to Yousuf Karsh's 1957 portrait in Cuba evoking a larger-than-life Hemingway in a heavy turtleneck sweater, to revealing photographs taken by John Bryson near the end of Hemingway's life.

Michael Reynolds, who has studied and written about Hemingway for more than a quarter-century, provides a thought-provoking essay on Hemingway as a literary icon, and Frederick Voss examines Hemingway's life in the light of various significant portraits.

Frederick Voss is the National Portrait Gallery's senior historian and curator of its Time collection. Michael Reynolds is the author of a five-volume biography of Ernest Hemingway.