What went wrong with Hemingway? The question was being asked, despite the award of the Nobel Prize in 1954, long before he died. Critics were remarking—in some cases, with justification—on his decline almost as soon as he was flush with success. His early short stories have ever been stoutly defended, but even parts of the "The Sun Also Rises" (1926) and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929) came under early attack. And the books written in the 1930s sharply divided opinion. For some, his Spanish Civil War novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), represented a return to form—certainly the public loved it—but for others it was merely Hemingway striking attitudes. By the time he published his first postwar novel, "Across the River and Into the Trees" (1950), it seemed to many that, in the words of the critic Wilfrid Sheed in 1977, he was "an artistically desperate man. . . . In 'Across the River and Into the Trees' he made a complete ass of himself."→

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