BLOOMINGTON - James Plath has had two papas in his life - the one who sired him, and the one who's been a key part of his literary paternity.

That second papa, or Papa, is now the subject of a book-length photographic odyssey, with Plath as our tour guide.

"Historic Photographs of Ernest Hemingway," an entry in Turner Publishing's popular "Historic Photographs of …" series, is a handsome coffee table volume in the best sense of the term: hefty but sensibly proportioned, glossy but tastefully designed.

It's also one that its famously frills-free subject would surely appreciate: lean and to the point, at every turn of its 216 pages.

Plath, chairman of Illinois Wesleyan University's English Department, deploys his captions to both identify and enlighten in a plainspoken style that straddles the informal and the scholarly.

The result is the expansive life of 20th century's most celebrated author compressed into a well-lighted nutshell - from his July 1899 birth in Oak Park through his July 1961 suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

In between: a globe-trotting odyssey through wars, loves, homes, marriages, books, celebrities, infirmities, cronies, boats, bars and offspring.

Not to mention the proudly born fruits of rods and rifles.

It's also the latest chapter in Plath's close relationship with Papa, which has included a previous volume published 10 years ago, "Remembering Ernest Hemingway," and a term as director of the Hemingway Days Writers Workshop & Conference in Key West, Fla.

As a member of the Hemingway Society, he's been invited twice to lecture at Hemingway's former Cuban residence, Museo Hemingway.

"It did strike me as an interesting, attractive challenge," says Plath, who resides with his wife, poet Zarina Mullan Plath, and their two children, in Bloomington.

He's talking about the offer from Turner Publishing to do the book, which he received in November. Yes, November. Of 2008. Five months ago.

The day the offer came, "I'd just popped one manuscript for another book in the mail as my wife said, 'never again!'"

Her edict came, he says, as a result of "the long time it took and the hours and hours I'd devoted to it."

"And then the e-mail from Turner came …"

Because the book would be an entry in a pre-conceived series for a major publisher, the deadline he was handed was not up for negotiation: one month.

"In academia (publishing), there are no such things as hard deadlines, because they're so used to professors with teaching schedules and the demands of their lives, and they're just happy to get a book sooner or later," Plath says. "But these folks played hardball: it was either go or not go based on the (one-month) deadline."

His initial reaction: "Writing captions … I bet I could do it."

Then, a secondary reaction, which is where the challenge and the attractiveness came in: "I bet I could write a biography of Hemingway within those captions."

The reality, though: The 212 photographs pre-selected from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, the world's largest repository of Hemingway material, were going to require more work.

"They clearly had just started grabbing interesting photos no matter how much duplication there was or how they were spread out over time periods," he says. "And only 6 to 12 of them were identified in any remote way."

Plath's real challenge, then, became one of scholarly research to nail the identifications, with unerring accuracy the bottom line.

Putting the pressure on from that end, he wrangled a two-week extension.

Those six weeks of wrestling Ernest Hemingway's life and times into a definitive photographic chronicle were how Plath spent his Christmas vacation.

Long story short, which is the way the subject would want it, no doubt: the seemingly breezy task of captioning 200-odd photos involved considerable detective work and supplementing from Plath's own resources and contacts, all in the name of doing his literary Papa proud.

"By design, this a coffee table book," he notes. "What I did was split the difference between the type of language that I thought would engage the average person who sees a copy of it and starts flipping through it and the type of language that would engage the person who is a Hemingway scholar.

"I kept my focus somewhere in between and steered a steady course. It's a very readable book, I think."

The book

Title: "Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway"

Author: James Plath, chair of Illinois Wesleyan University's English Department

Publisher/price: Turner Publishing; $39.95

Availability: All major and independent bookstores, Amazon.com, turnerpublishing.com

10 years ago …

James Plath's "Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway" is being released on the 10th anniversary of Plath's previous hardbound encounter with Papa, "Remembering Ernest Hemingway."

That 1999 tome, co-authored with Frank Simons, is still in print, via Amazon.com and other sellers, notes Plath.

Published in both hard- and soft-cover editions, the 168-page volume is a collection of 13 interviews with family and friends of the author, including sons Patrick and Gregory, close Key West friends Charlie and Lorine Thompson, and Idaho hunting companion Forrest MacMullen.