SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “Hemingway: Sunlight and Night-Face.” National Review 21, no. 15 (22 April 1969): 390-91.

In the following laudatory review of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Hart praises Baker's prodigious accomplishment.

On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le néant.

—Eugénie de Guerin

In a famous passage in Death in the Afternoon Hemingway remarked that “the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water,” and he intended this as a comment upon his own writing, where much of the meaning is beneath the surface, its power and complexity standing in marked contrast to the simplicity, indeed often the slightness, of the story itself. In writing a story, he said, “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

This technique, when...