SOURCE: Weeks, Edward. “The Peripatetic Reviewer.” Atlantic Monthly 223, no. 6 (June 1969): 110-12.

In the following review, Weeks offers a favorable assessment of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story.

Shortly after its publication I remember discussing A Farewell to Arms with a famous obstetrician. “How did you like it?” I asked. “Great,” he said, “I thought it was great. But I couldn't bear to read about Catherine Barkley's death. It was too near the real thing.”

That criticism by one professional of another expresses what many of my generation felt about Ernest Hemingway: he did bring us so dangerously close to the real thing. Pete Wellington, who bossed him as a young reporter on the Kansas City Star, said that Ernest “wanted always to go where the action was,” and a year later while convalescing from his serious wounds in Italy, Hemingway made a statement, in a letter to his father...