His life and his fiction were so closely entwined that the man and the legend merged in the mind of the public. His story spans six decades: from a happy boyhood in a suburb of Chicago, to worldwide fame as a literary genius and heroic activist, and to the tragic last years of his life. Drawing on Hemingway's own diaries, letters and unpublished works, and the personal testimony of many who knew him, Carlos Baker separates the man from the myth.Each stage of Hemingway's life is examined with fresh insight: his summers in Michigan; his apprenticeship as a reporter; his first war - World War I in Italy; his marriage and years in Europe; the Spanish Civil War; his life in Florida, Wyoming and Cuba; World War II, where he trod a thin line between correspondent and combatant; the postwar years and the writing of The Old Man and the Sea, which brought him the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes.He was shockingly unpredictable, going to extremes of kindness and cruelty with those closest to him. And everywhere he went, his magnetism drew clusters of the famous and near-famous around him.