The Face in the Mirror is a study of a largely overlooked theme in Hemingway's writing - his depiction of writers and the special problems they face, professionally and personally. From his earliest years as a short-story writer to the end of his career when he attempted to complete two ambitious novels, Hemingway was preoccupied with the artistic and ethical dilemmas of his writer protagonists. Fleming's book explores Hemingway's concern with writers from the 1920s through the early 1960s.

Hemingway began his career with an easy confidence that he could profit from the errors of other authors he had encountered during his Paris period: his early story "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" and his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises depict writers who are flawed by a too-shallow commitment to their art that results in truncated literary careers and inferior literary work.

By the 1930s, having established his own reputation, Hemingway turned his scrutiny inward, examining some of his own faults in such works as "Fathers and Sons" and "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.".

After World War II, Hemingway attempted to resume his literary career with Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, neither of which he was able to finish. Both of these massive manuscripts thoroughly treated the problems an artist faces in balancing art and humanity.

In A Moveable Feast, nearly completed at the time of his death, Hemingway retreated from the introspection of the two unfinished previous novels and instead created the myth of Ernest Hemingway as happy artist, surrounded by inferior talents who exemplify the ways in which authors may fail.

Fleming's book provides a closer examination of such neglected works as To Have and Have Not and the Spanish Civil War short stories. His readings of Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden will change the way future readers and critics view those novels. Fleming suggests that both of these postwar novels are major works of fiction, adding new dimensions to the Hemingway canon.