Synopsis:
Between 1948 and 1961, Earnest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.
Review:
First published in 1966, this adulatory memoir made news by revealing that Ernest Hemingway's 1961 death was a suicide. It also provided the mythmaking, Nobel Prize-winning author with an opportunity to promulgate his preferred public persona from beyond the grave. Chronicling their friendship over the final 14 years of Hemingway's life, A.E. Hotchner vividly captured the writer's appeal as a man and his genius as a storyteller in extensive direct quotes. He draws from contemporary notes, tape recordings, and (he reveals in the foreword to this edition published for the Hemingway centennial) disguised excerpts from personal letters that Hemingway's widow, Mary, refused him permission to use. In conversation, Hemingway sounds like one of his own fictional heroes: terse, witty, profane, manly. Hotchner, in his mid-20s when they first met in 1948 and, he freely admits, "struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe," seldom evaluates either the veracity of or the motivations behind the writer's anecdotes. He makes no claim to be objective, which adds to the emotional force of the painful final chapters showing a desolate, depressed Hemingway convinced he could no longer write. By no means the whole truth, Hotchner's loving portrait shows Hemingway to readers as he wanted to be seen and as his most ardent admirers saw him. --Wendy Smith
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