The central character and the omnipresent focal point of True at First Light is the narrator who is, in propria persona, Ernest Hemingway. Given this fact, the narrative's primary mode of being amounts to an ironic, humorous, and self-deprecating record of the interior meditative life of a writer set in juxtaposition against the life of action of a temporary game warden going about his duties. In the contemplative mode, there is much made here of the literary life, of the writer's relationship to readers, critics, biographers, and fellow writers. Literary allusions abound. For example, the passage which gives the work its current title (not Hemingway's title, but a good choice made by the editor) evokes both Virgil and Dante in a context dealing with art and truth: "We were all reading the Georgics then in the C. Day Lewis translation. We had two copies but they were always...