Hemingway: The Homecoming, Michael Reynolds's extraordinary evocation of Hemingway's life, finds the writer in Paris in 1926 having just finished The Sun Also Rises, and follows him through the dissolution of his first marriage and the beginning of his second. We witness the emergence of the public image of Hemingway and his development into a mature and major literary talent.

Most significantly, Reynolds reveals how the emerging Hemingway hero-tough, masculine, self-reliant-represented a radical break from figures in his earlier work, who are vulnerable, wounded survivors living precariously in a world in which they have little control. And he shows how this transition had its roots in Hemingway's own life, as he developed from a rootless and insecure expatriot into a forceful figure of myth, influenced by his father's suicide, his second marriage, and his return to America.