NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A "riveting"* international cloak-and-dagger epic, this is the lovely untold tale of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous mystery lifestyles -- together with his function as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo" -- that fueled his artwork and his undoing.

In 2010, whereas he used to be the historian on the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, an established American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, started to discover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and stunning relationship that used to be way more advanced, sustained, and fraught with hazards than has ever been formerly intended. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and alluring narrative, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, "looks one of the shadows and reveals a Hemingway no longer visible sooner than" (London evaluation of Books), revealing for the 1st time the complete tale of this hidden part of Hemingway's existence: his troubling recruitment by means of Soviet spies to paintings with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, in brief order by means of a posh set of mystery relationships with American organizations, together with the FBI, the dep. of country, the place of work of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and the workplace of Strategic prone (OSS), a precursor to the CIA.

Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces in the course of the Nineteen Thirties, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion within the life-and-death global of the progressive left, from his passionate dedication to the Spanish Republic; his winning pursuit by means of Soviet NKVD brokers, who valued Hemingway's effect, entry, and mobility; his wartime assembly in East Asia with communist chief Chou En-Lai, the long run most suitable of the People's Republic of China; and eventually to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels within the past due Nineteen Fifties and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds both explores Hemingway's participation in quite a few roles as an agent for the USA executive, together with looking Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions within the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba known as the "Crook manufacturing unit" that stated to the yank embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground function in Europe, the place he helped OSS achieve key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought along the U.S. infantry within the bloody endgame of worldwide battle II.

As he examines the hyperlinks among Hemingway's paintings as an operative and as an writer, Reynolds unearths how Hemingway's mystery adventures stimulated his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and psychological decline (including paranoia) that plagued him in the course of the postwar years -- a interval marked via the crimson Scare and McCarthy hearings, which destroyed the lifetime of a person with Soviet connections. Reynolds additionally illuminates how those self same reports performed a task in a few of Hemingway's maximum works, together with For Whom the Bell Tolls and The outdated guy and the Sea, whereas additionally including to the weight that he carried on the finish of his existence and maybe contributing to his suicide.

A literary biography with the soul of an espionage mystery, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is a necessary contribution to our knowing of the lifestyles, paintings, and destiny of 1 of America's so much mythical authors.

*William Doyle