"I remember [Ford Madox] Ford telling me that a man should always write a letter thinking of how it would read to posterity. This made such a bad impression on me that I burned every letter in the flat including Ford's. Should you save the hulls a .50 cal shucks out for posterity? Save them. o.k. But they should be written or fired not for posterity but for the day and the hour and posterity will always look after herself." (pg. 695)

There's an argument to be made that everything Ernest Hemingway wrote, from his short stories to his narrative journalism to his great novels, has the character of autobiography. He was a writer who didn't write about anything that he hadn't fully experienced himself and could write about truly, and so a reader who has read the major pieces has a decent measure of the man. But with the exception of A Moveable Feast, which might be considered Volume 1 in the whispers of an incomplete project, Hemingway didn't write any bona fide autobiography.

His posthumous Selected Letters, a huge, nearly 1,000-page tome stretching from his adolescence in the Mid-West, through the moveable feasts of Paris and Spain, two world wars, the Gulf Stream and the African bush, to the sad, declining end back in the American wilderness at the age of 61, is arguably the closest thing to My Life by Ernest Hemingway, short of a literal reading of The Complete Works of the same. Even if Hemingway himself didn't mean for them to be an autobiography, editor Carlos Baker has selected and organised the letters in such a way that they become one.

Certainly, this approach is intentional; Baker writes in his introduction that "the background for [his] stories, as well as much else, is vividly represented in his contemporaneous letters, which trace his evolution in his own words, add up to the longest 'book' he ever wrote, and constitute the closest approach to an autobiography that he ever did" (pg. xv) and, for a Hemingway fan, there is much to satisfy. Context is sometimes absent (despite some able footnoting by Baker), but no one will be (or should be) reading this book who hasn't already read most if not all of Hemingway's work. I've read everything, so it was very illuminating to see such a storied life as a 1,000-page, 44-year work in progress.

It's quite overwhelming, but never exhausting if you're a fan of Hemingway. Not for nothing was he the template for the memetic 'Most Interesting Man in the World' character in those Dos Equis commercials; he fought, loved and experienced some of the best vistas the world has to offer, and there are countless names you will recognise – famous writers, celebrities, actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and one of the last letters in the selection is a note of congratulations to the newly-inaugurated JFK. We hear how he communicated with just about every important person in his life, from his parents to his children to his wives (all four of them are represented here, except Martha Gellhorn, which is interesting to note in and of itself considering their tempestuous relationship) and his editors and publishers. We hear his opinions on literature (letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald are early highlights) and the emergence of a philosophy of writing. We hear a young Hemingway write his friend, the poet Ezra Pound, that he has no money and is never going to get published ("I feel cheerful as hell. These god damn bastards." (pg. 119)) and we hear an older Hemingway mention to his publisher that a 20,000-word piece, taken from a wider manuscript about the sea, might work well on its own. The Old Man and the Sea would go on to be cited by the panel that awarded him the Nobel Prize.

We see a human side that was not always allowed to emerge in his taut, highly-focused writing. It is an unusual experience to hear an author's voice that is usually so precise speak loosely to friends, make jokes, and betray insecurities and doubts and moments of weakness ("Am lonely as a bastard, drank too much last night and feel like anything but work now" (pg. 282)). During one spell in 1947, we hear him tell multiple people that his son Patrick has been ill and had to be fed rectally for 45 days – even repeating the news in a semi-formal letter to his literary rival William Faulkner (pg. 625), in what must rank as one of the most prestigious 'embarrassing dad' moments in history. To all the titles which are given to identify Hemingway's multitudes – prose innovator, short story master, war correspondent, bullfighting aficionado, man of action – Selected Letters surprisingly finds us adding a few more.

This loose, sprawling collection of personal correspondence might not be autobiography, but it might be something better. The absence of any editorializing (at least, any beyond the usual sense of self-consciousness when putting pen to paper, even for a letter) gives an immediacy and an honesty to the collection. It is a testament to his writing talent that he took the same experiences he writes about here and hewed them and cast them and polished them into prose that could be published, returning to his stories the immediacy and honesty which they had as experiences but which could not be entirely communicated to a readership when raw.

We learn more about underwritten aspects of his life. We associate Hemingway with World War One and the Spanish Civil War, because of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, but nowhere in his writing – only in the Selected Letters – do we see how much he was affected by World War Two also. The famous incident where he liberated the Paris Ritz in 1944 is elaborated on, and he writes his soon-to-be wife Mary that, because of her and because of his war-correspondent experiences in France, this period of August-September 1944 "has been the truly happiest month I've ever had in all my life" (pg. 566). We can believe it.

It is also the beginning of the decline, not only because of overwork and because writing seems "dull as hell" compared to the wartime experience (pg. 639), but because we begin to read, with some alarm, about the number of head injuries Hemingway begins to sustain, from shrapnel and explosions, from car and plane crashes and fishing accidents. His voice is still there ("Two surgeons said… that I have a very thick skull. This may be literary criticism." (pg. 702)) but we see it begin to fade. He mentions headaches more frequently. He sounds old, tired, a man of action winding down. "Everyone is dead now and it is a lonesome trade," he writes on page 650, when he is just 49 years old. The final letters, written during grave mental decline, are almost unbearably heavy to read, despite their plainness. "Am feeling fine and very cheerful… hope to see you all soon," he writes a sick nine-year-old son of a family friend in the book's final letter (pg. 921). Three weeks later, he shot himself.

In a way, it is a shame that Hemingway's de facto autobiography is so fascinating, because the legend of his life has surpassed the appreciation of his writing. "I want to run as a writer," he writes on page 712, "not as a man who had been to the wars; nor a bar room fighter; nor a shooter; nor a horse-player; nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such." Maybe that's impossible, given how bold and outsized his life was, but it says a lot that I can share almost nothing of the outlook, opinion or interests of the man and yet cast my eyes over lines of his with the same appreciative ease as when I look at a great painting or building. I welcome hundreds of pages of his stuff on bullfighting or fishing or hunting, despite having no personal interest in any of them.

His way of living was and remains part of his aura and an essential component of the vitality of his prose, but his is also a style that is precise, clean and revolutionary. Plenty of the letters have a literary merit (though readers coming to the book expecting to unearth a hidden Snows of Kilimanjaro here and there will be sorely disappointed) but their greatest literary effect is in their imprecision. Hemingway frequently asks the people he is writing to forgive the 'rottenness' of his letter-writing, saying that all the 'juice' goes into his books and that "anytime I can write a good letter… it's a sign I'm not working" (pg. 606). It brings home to us just how hard Hemingway worked at his writing. The best of his published prose has a sharpness; not a sharpness like a knife but a sharpness like the shaped stone in a fine piece of architecture. Seeing him build that up here is an education.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Selected Letters, beyond the obvious autobiographical element, is that it reminds us that the best way to get the real story on Hemingway – the 'gen', as he would call it – is to read Hemingway direct. I am baffled, sometimes, at the number of hit pieces there are on Hemingway's writing, legacy and persona even now, nearly sixty years after his death. I have many theories for this (it's fashionable, and the dead don't fight back; he's 'stale, pale and male'; his precision-crafted writing puts many writers – particularly writers of hacky clickbait journalism – to shame, so they try to tear him down…) but I think the main reason is that Hemingway presents to his readers, and his culture, an ideal of aspirant manliness, however lame that may sound. I don't mean machismo, or boorishness – though those charges can, in part, be laid at Hemingway's door – but a sense of going your own true path and making yourself strong enough to suffer the slings and arrows. This is anathema to contemporary Western society, which lays all the ills of the world, slavishly and cultishly, at the door of the stale, pale and male (and it's particularly tragic as there's almost nothing political, and certainly nothing ideological, in Hemingway's writing).

Read Hemingway direct; start with his best works, of course, but also read Selected Letters and sharpen your image of the man. He might have loved life more than he loved writing ("Mon Wogoman and I were at one time the only guys our age who had killed 3 grown grizzlies by ourselves running onto them alone in the high country… Swedish prizes [i.e. the Nobel] do not move you in that way" (pg. 871)) but he also loved writing, and had a clear, honest vision of what he wanted to do with it. Read Selected Letters and re-discover a man who struggled to maintain his own unique path for over forty years, in the face of mockery, condescension, snobbery and personal tragedy (and plenty of kudos too). And he succeeded. For all his hunting, fishing, drinking and warring – and, yes, boasting – Hemingway's real display of manliness was in his writing, showing us that real masculinity is courage of thought. ( )