Less Than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris

Based largely on Hemingway's letters, articles and stories, this second installment (following Along With Youth ) of a multivolume biography re-creates the period 1922-1929. He and his first wife, Hadley, spent those years mainly in Paris, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, skiing, running the bulls, drinking, socializing with the people who influenced the novelist or were incorporated into his fiction: Pound, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Gertrude Stein, the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds, Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden--leading ultimately to his affair with Pauline Pheifferstet , who became his second wife. Griffin's direct, uncomplicated style recalls that of the man he depicts--the brash, impetuous, selfish ``son of a bitch sans peur et sans reproche.'' (Sept.)