Many of us are curious about the lives that great writers led when they were young, but some are curious for different reasons than others. There are those who are genuinely interested in the personal circumstances that give rise to great art, who are captivated by the spectacle of a young person discovering his talent, deciding what use he will make of it, and developing a mature and triumphant creative vision. Then there are those who, being indifferent to the germination of genius, are diverted by the inside gossip, by the sexy tidbits, by the miraculous metamorphosis of a nobody from Dublin, Dorset, St. Louis, or St. Paul into an immortal—and the closer it all comes to a Judith Krantz novel, the better. Alas, the biographers and memoirists who have chronicled Ernest Hemingway’s fitful and flaming youth in the wake of Charles A. Fenton’s pioneering study, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), have tended to provide more sustenance for the Judith Krantz fans than for the bona fide admirers of the literary art.

Now a young scholar named Peter Griffin has furnished us with yet another account of Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood and young manhood, entitled Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years.[1] The book—whose title is that of an unfinished 1925 novel about Nick Adams as well as of an unremarkable poem that appeared in Hemingway’s first published book, the 1923 Three Stories and Ten Poems(“Yesterday’s Tribune is gone/ Along with youth,”