HEMINGWAY: The Final Years. By Michael Reynolds. Norton. 390 pp. $30.

TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT: A Fictional Memoir. By Ernest Hemingway. Edited with an introduction by Patrick Hemingway. Scribner. 319 pp. $26.

Come July, the Hemingway band will strike up again, this time to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Papa's birth-a reprise, of sorts, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hemingway's suicide, when four biographies of the Old Man vied for attention, two of them concerned only with Hemingway as Young Man. That same year, 1986, Scribner's published The Garden of Eden, a posthumous Hemingway novel cobbled up from various manuscript drafts. Then in 1987, Kenneth Lynn's controversial biography brilliantly delineated the androgynous origins of Hemingway's confused, churlish machismo. And not long after that, James Mellow published his 700-page Hemingway tome, while Michael Reynolds delivered three more installments of a multivolume biography.

The appetite for Hemingway is apparently insatiable. Of course, Hemingway remains good copy, for unlike most writers, he didn't just sit around and write. Merchant of the mot juste, American style, Hemingway was also fighter, soldier, lover, hunter, not to mention braggart, boozer, bully and perennial ex-husband. As Edmund Wilson said as early as 1939, Hemingway was his own "worst-invented" character: obnoxious and incredible. A Westerner-brave, courageous and true-he even had the sense to blow his own head off when he found the world, inner and outer, too much with him. But Hemingway believed much of his personal myth, an amalgam of stoicism, vulnerability, bashfulness and rage, and in his best writing embedded it all in terse, lyrical prose. Such a sad, silly and talented bastard is a biographer's dream.

More sedate than their subject, his biographers fall into two main camps. The first group follows the gentlemanly lead of Carlos Baker, whose 1969 authorized biography is a model of meticulous research, tact and tedium. The second group owes its allegiance to Malcolm Cowley, who, though he never wrote a Hemingway biography, began to sound the Hemingway depths in his 1944 introduction to the Portable Hemingway, calling him one of America's "haunted and nocturnal writers." (Janet Flanner once heard a rumor that Scribner's, when deciding on the author of Hemingway's official biography, gave his widow, Mary, the choice of Cowley, who had known her husband, or Baker, who had not. She chose Baker as the less dangerous.)

Now Michael Reynolds extends the Carlos Baker tradition at its prodigious best. Of all Hemingway biographers, Reynolds is by far the most indefatigable. In The Young Hemingway, he adroitly peels the make- believe off Hemingway's trumped-up exploits during the First World War, when the young, handsome ambulance driver dispensed chocolate, not bullets, in the trenches, his wounds more a matter of Teddy Roosevelt- inflamed fantasy than anything like what Jake Barnes endured, literally or symbolically, in The Sun Also Rises. Similarly, Reynolds's next three volumes trace Hemingway's evolution from Midwestern journalist to celebrated writer, the man who hammered Gertrude Stein's prose rhythms into a minimalism all his own. Against the backdrop of...