Hemingway Biographer
One of the major literary events of the year will happen this month when Scribner's brings out Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, the product of seven years of research and writing by CARLOS BAKER '32. From the time Hemingway's publisher announced that Baker would be the author of this authorized biography there has been an unusual amount of talk about the book (750 pages, 100 illustrations, $10 the copy), and a very large sale is expected. The biography is the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April.
Although Carlos Baker, who is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton, corresponded with Hemingway for ten years prior to the famous writer's death in 1961, the two men never met. Baker's 1952 book, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist was the first full-length critical study of Ernest Hemingway's work and was mainly responsible for launching their friendship by mail. After the writer's death, the cooperation of his widow, Mary Hemingway, was essential to the preparation of the definitive biography and this was fully given. "Mary was very good in giving me free access to all her husband's papers and to her own diary as well," Baker has stated. "She never attempted to influence my judgments, although at her request I omitted some material she wanted to reserve for an autobiography she is contemplating."
Among the materials placed at his disposal were all of Hemingway's unpublished manuscripts. Contrary to the belief that a treasure chest of unpublished fiction existed, Baker is of the opinion that only a small part of it - possibly one novella and two or three short stories - measure up to the standard expected of the Nobel Prize author whose terse, realistic style made him a tremendous influence in world literature.
Through his long and exhaustive research for the biography - gathering thousands of letters, interviewing hundreds of persons who knew Hemingway, traveling to all the places where Hemingway worked and played, digging into every conceivable source of information - Carlos Baker came to know Hemingway deeply, even though he had never met him. From this research emerged the picture of a complex and magnetic man, a "romantic activist," as Baker calls him, combined with the serious artist and moralist, concerned mainly with how to live and how to die. Baker states that "it became possible to discriminate absolutely between the autobiographical and invention in the novels and short stories." One great contribution of his book will be the separation of fact from myth in the life of Hemingway.
Taking on the writing of the definitive story of this great American author was no small challenge, but in many ways Carlos Baker was the perfect man for the job. To his unsurpassed knowledge of Hemingway's works he added the advantages of being an experienced literary scholar and a novelist himself. His two novels, also published by Scribner's, are A Friend in Power (1958) and The Land of Rumbelow (1963). In addition to a book about Shelley and a collection of his own poetry, A Year and a Day (1963), he has edited eleven other books, two of them related to Hemingway, and has written many literary essays and reviews.
Dartmouth in 1957 honored Carlos Baker with a Doctorate of Letters, and two years ago the Alumni Council, on which he served from 1958 to 1961, conferred its Alumni Award. He has had a constant interest in the College since graduation, and among varied services he has been 1932's class secretary and class newsletter editor. A member of Princeton's English faculty since 1937, when he -began graduate work toward his Ph.D. (1940), he eventually became department chairman and was named Woodrow Wilson Professor in 1954. He has been lecturer at Oxford and a Guggenheim Fellow. The town of Princeton knows him as a many-sided citizen and has saluted him as its "Man of the Year." No less than Ernest Hemingway, his favorite subject, Carlos Baker has been an activist all his life.
