"He is not yet twenty-three - the callow, unsophisticated, ruggedly six-foot-two Ernest Hemingway who arrives in Paris in 1922 - but with a parcel of war tales and a pocketful of prose he has already begun working on the legend he will become, whether he's carousing with the all-night crowd in the bistros of Montmartre or taking a polite glass of wine at the Cafe Voltaire with James Joyce.".

"To startling effect biography commingles with fiction in this novel as it introduces a brash but magnetic Hemingway to the high style and bohemian haunts of the artists and exiles who, with unflinching candor, tell his story. For this Hemingway is known by the company he keeps: by Mike Strater, a painter he admires and woefully betrays: by the "ambisexual" dilettante Robert McAlmon: by the eccentric and resentful Alice B. Toklas, a sympathetic Sylvia Beach, a bemused Nora Joyce; by Hemingway's loyal wife.

Hadley, meanwhile strives desperately not only to please but also to comprehend."--BOOK JACKET.