Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway’s who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway’s in ways that compelled writers for publications as divergent as the Guardian and Field & Stream to compare them. Unlike Hemingway, however, Farson has been forgotten.
This high-flying and literate biography recovers Farson’s life in its multifaceted details, from his time as an arms dealer to Czarist Russia during World War I, to his firsthand reporting on Hitler and Mussolini, to his assignment in India, where he broke the news of Gandhi’s arrest by the British, to his excursion to Kenya a few years before the Mau Mau Uprising. Farson also found the time to publish an autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, which made him an international publishing sensation in 1936, as well as Going Fishing, one of the most enduring of all outdoors books.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Lost Generation whose art competed with a public image grander than reality, once confessed that while he had to rely on his imagination, Farson could simply draw from his own event-filled life. Almost Hemingway is the definitive window on that remarkable story.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction: Remembering Negley Farson
1. Europe, 1925
2. The Old General
3. Fish Mad
4. England and War
5. Russia
6. Crash Landing in Egypt
7. Life in the Wilds
8. The Exotic Life of a Foreign Correspondent
9. Whaling Adventure
10. Among the Spaniards
11. Russia Again
12. Meeting Ghandi
13. Covering Hitler and the World
14. Writing a Best Seller
15. South American Bender
16. Taking the Cure
17. His Life in a Novel
18. Mired in African Mud and Acrimony
19. A Bomber’s Moon
20. Writing a Masterpiece
21. Back to Russia
22. Back to Africa
23. Road’s End
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Über den Autor
Former reporters for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos have been professional authors for more than fifty years. Rex Bowman has written for Time, the Washington Times, and New York Times Upfront. Carlos Santos has covered stories for the New York Times and People magazine as well as for the Associated Press. They are coauthors of Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America (Virginia).