Anthony Burgess' Ernest Hemingway and His World is trying to be an attractive (there are over a hundred photographs) summary of Hemingway's life. Yet there is more to writing a biography, even one as short as this, than merely mixing facts and anecdotes with occasional off-hand interpretations. Burgess' central theme is that "Hemingway the man was as much a creation as his books, and a far inferior creation."

While this is an interesting thesis, Burgess never argues it. Even the crudest of amateur psychologists could make better sense of Hemingway's self-creation. I say psychologists because Burgess himself plays this role, his fundamental critical assumption being that a writer's work can be explained and understood through a knowledge of his life. This can be a valuable assumption, especially with a writer whose work is as autobiographical as Hemingway's. But instead of exploring the relationship between Hemingway's life and the...