When Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 he left four unfinished works - A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and an untitled work on his travels in Africa. The edited versions of the three novels that were published between 1964 and 1986 have been presented to readers and scholars as discrete texts, even though they are disjointed and fit uncomfortably into the body of Hemingway's work.

Through extensive literary detective work, Burwell has uncovered substantial evidence which reveals that Hemingway in fact designed the three published works as a trilogy - what she terms "his own portrait of the artist." She combines textual analysis with new biographical information to create a compelling document of a period of Hemingway's life which biographers have barely begun to probe.

The result, Professor Burwell demonstrates, is that Hemingway inscribed in the four works he could neither complete nor abandon the life-long gender anxieties he had come to recognize as the legacy of "dangerous families."