Ernest Hemingway was an involuntary chameleon, who would shift seamlessly from a self-cultivated image of hero, aesthetic radical, and existential non-conformist to a figure made up at various points of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, narcissism and arbitrary vindictiveness.

Richard Bradford shows that Hemingway's work is by parts erratic and unique because it was tied into these unpredictable, bizarre features of his personality. Impressionism and subjectivity always play some part in the making of literary works. Some authors try to subdue them while others treat them as the essentials of creativity but they endure as a ubiquitous element of all literature.

They are the writer's private signature, their authorial fingerprint. In this ground-breaking and intensely revealing biography, which includes a complete reassessment of Hemingway's oeuvre Hemingway's unfixed personality is shown to be the index to why and how he wrote as he did.