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    Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
    Unavailable
    Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
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    Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
    Ebook489 pages9 hours

    Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961

    By Nicholas Reynolds

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous secret life in espionage

    A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A finalist for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award

    "IMPORTANT" (Wall Street Journal) • "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) • "CAPTIVATING" (Missourian)

    A riveting international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway’s secret adventures in espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter that fueled both his art and his undoing.

    While he was the historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short order by a complex set of secret relationships with American agencies.

    Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China; and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory" that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II.

    As he examines the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his life and perhaps contributing to his suicide.

    A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 14, 2017
    ISBN9780062440150
    Author

    Nicholas Reynolds

    Nicholas Reynolds has worked in the fields of modern military history and intelligence off and on for forty years, with some unusual detours. Freshly minted PhD from Oxford University in hand, he joined the United States Marine Corps in the 1970s, serving as an infantry officer and then as a historian. As a colonel in the reserves, he eventually became officer in charge of field history, deploying historians around the world to capture history as it was being made. When not on duty with the USMC, he served as a CIA officer at home and abroad, immersing himself in the very human business of espionage. Most recently, he was the historian for the CIA Museum, responsible for developing its strategic plan and helping to turn remarkable artifacts into compelling stories. He currently teaches as an adjunct professor for Johns Hopkins University and, with his wife, Becky, cares for rescue pugs.

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    Reviews for Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

    3.5/5

    21 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book documented interesting aspects of Hemingway that is very intriguing to me. The book is well done.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating take on Hemingway's political self, and Reynolds does a fine job of distilling the background needed to grasp where Papa was coming from at any given time from the Spanish Civil War through the Cold War without drowning the reader in detail. I've read a number of other biographies of Hemingway, and have always found his personal life more interesting than his fiction. This one may turn me back to the iconic novels I've brushed aside since my 20's, because now I feel I may "get" them better. I'm sure I'll still find them a bit too macho for my taste, but I've never been entirely comfortable with my attitude toward his work. The premise of WSSS is that Hemingway flirted with spying for Russia, even while he was doing some low-grade espionage in an unofficial capacity for the US. Although he was demonstrably never a communist, or even a sympathizer, he was fiercely anti-fascist, and believed for decades that the United States needed to have better relations with Russia for the good of Europe and North America. He was most definitely contacted by the NKVD (pre-cursor to the KGB) as a potential spy, and the FBI kept a file on him, without actively investigating him. These two facts weighed on Hemingway's mind in his later years, and fear of eventual consequences of his activities may have contributed to the paranoia he suffered before his suicide.
    • 3/5
      Before this book, I knew only the hazy outlines of Hemingway's life and I appreciated the way this book fleshed out the details of Hemingway's life from the 1930s to his suicide in 1961. Hemingway's spying activities (if they could be called that) provide insight into how the famous writer thought and perceived the world around him. Considering the big events of the period - the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, and Castro's revolution in Cuba - this book also reads as a fascinating history of a tumultuous era. I'd recommend this to Hemingway fans and those interested in the history of the period.
    • 3/5
      Having never read a full Hemingway biography, but a fan of his work, I found just enough here to keep me engaged. If I was less interested in Hemingway or less interested in the birth of the Cold War and the death of American communism, I might have put the book away much sooner.