Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend [Hardcover]

In the summer of 1917, Ernest Hemingway was an eighteen-year-old high school graduate unsure of his future. The American entry into the Great War stirred thoughts of joining the army. While many of his friends in Oak Park, Illinois, were heading to college, Hemingway couldn’t make up his mind and eventually chose to begin a career in writing and journalism at theKansas CityStar, one of the great newspapers of its day.

In six and a half months at theStar, Hemingway experienced a compressed, streetwise alternative to a college education that opened his eyes to urban violence, the power of literature, the hard work of writing, and a constantly swirling stage of human comedy and drama. The Kansas City experience led Hemingway into the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy, where, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday, he was dangerously wounded at the front.

Award-winning writer Steve Paul takes a measure of this pivotal year when Hemingway’s self-invention and transformation began—from a “modest, rather shy and diffident boy” to a confident writer who aimed to find and record the truth throughout his life.Hemingway at Eighteenprovides a fresh perspective on Hemingway’s writing, sheds new light on this young man bound for greatness, and introduces anew a legendary American writer at the very beginning of his journey.

"A remarkably fine, absolutely illuminating book." —Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship

“Do we need another Hemingway biography? Absolutely, if it’s as intelligent, insightful, and big hearted asHemingway at Eighteen. This is a Hemingway few of us know—dazzlingly talented but still young, pulsing with ambition, and searching for his place in the literary world. Steve Paul has given us the origins of a legend.” —Candice MilllÄ