"Any man's life, told truly," Ernest Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon (1932), "is a novel," and he strove to lead a life "better than any picaresque novel you ever read." The mention of his name conjures up a host of images--a cub reporter chasing mayhem in Kansas City; a Red Cross ambulance driver wounded in World War I; a traumatized veteran trout fishing in the Michigan wilderness; a bereted young writer rubbing elbows with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce in 1920s Paris; a drunken fiesta hero running with the bulls in Pamplona; a deep-sea fisherman battling the Gulf Stream's giant marlin; a big-game hunter stalking lions in Africa's long grass; a war correspondent braving Fascist bullets in the Spanish Civil War; a World War II reporter liberating the Ritz bar; a bearded Nobel Prize winner who survived two plane crashes and lived...