Carlos Baker Critical Essay | Critical Review by Elizabeth Hardwick

Critical Review by Elizabeth Hardwick

SOURCE: Hardwick, Elizabeth. “Dead Souls.” New York Review of Books 1, no. 11 (5 June 1969): 3-4.

In the following unfavorable review, Hardwick describes Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story as “an extensive, exhausting, repetitive record of the events of Hemingway's life.”

Carlos Baker's biography of Ernest Hemingway [Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story] is bad news. The friendliness with which it has been received would seem to give sanction to this unfortunate development in the practice of biography. Baker's work is an enterprise of a special kind, not the first of its sort, and, one supposes, not the last. It is a form of book-making that rests upon only one major claim of the author: his access to the raw materials. The genre rises out of a vast collection of papers, letters, interviews, and junk, and is itself, in the end, still an accumulation, sorted, labeled, and dated, but only an...
(read more)