With the release of a flurry of feature and TV films about his life and work, and the publication of new books looking at his correspondence, his boat and even his favorite cocktails, Ernest Hemingway is once again center stage of contemporary culture. Theres something about Papa that makes any retirement to the wings only fleeting.Now, in this concise and sparkling account of the life and work of America’s most storied writer, Clancy Sigal, himself a National Book Award runner-up, presents a persuasive case for the relevance of Ernest Hemingway to readers today.Sigal breaks new ground in celebrating Hemingway’s passionate and unapologetic political partisanship, his stunningly concise, no-frills writing style, and an attitude to sex and sexuality much more nuanced than he is traditionally credited with. Simply for the pleasure provided by a consummate story teller, Hemingway is as much a must-read author as ever.Though Hemingway Lives! will provide plenty that’s new for those already familiar with Papa’s oeuvre, including substantial forays into his political commitments, the women in his life, and the astonishing range of his short stories, it assumes no prior knowledge of his work. Those venturing into Hemingway’s writing for the first time will find in Sigal an inspirational and erudite guide. Clancy Sigal a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award winner, is the author of Weekend in Dinlock, Going Away (a National Book Award runner-up), Zone of the Interior, The Secret Defector, A Woman of Uncertain Character, Black Sunset and The London Lover. He co-wrote the 2002 feature film Frida, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina and had a writing credit on the Richard Attenborough directed film, In Love and War… HIS WOUND AND THE BOW”Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.” -Hemingway’s introduction to the book Treasury for the Free WorldThe literary critic Edmund Wilson was the first American reviewer to “get” Hemingway because he understood the impact of Ernest’s war trauma on his writing. Wilson’s theory of “the wound and the bow” was taken from Sophocle’s play Philoctotes, about a famed Greek archer whose painful wound served not to weaken but strengthen his bow. Wilson posited that neurosis (the wound) was indispensable to great art (the bow). You don’t have to be maimed to write-but sometimes it helps. In his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway put it this way, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places…”That is, if you survive. Which Ernest almost didn’t.Drivers for the volunteer Ambulance Service in the Great War were vital to evacuate the bleeding wounded and dead in an ambulance often under deadly fire. Six hundred thousand Italian soldiers already had been killed in the fighting on a front that was considered a mere sideshow to the trench warfare in France.But Ernest didn’t have to wait for battlefield action to handle dead and dismembered bodies. As soon as he stepped off the train in Milan, Italy an ammunition plant exploded and he was sent to help pick up the shredded lumps of Italian corpses, many of them women workers. For a boy not yet out of his teens this baptism of blood and entrails must have been a tremendous shock.