This book is a definition of the process by which Ernest Hemingway transposed a conventional talent into an artistic skill. It is based on the premise that his extraordinary position—“Hemingway is the bronze god of the whole contemporary literary experience in America,” said Alfred Kazin in 1942—warrants close investigation of a period that lasted no more than half a dozen years. That the apprenticeship was a vital element is verified by the almost immediate assumption of Hemingway’s importance—by critics, public, and, above all, by other writers—as soon as his work began to appear in the United States in 1925, and by the durability of his creative life.