Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

Description

In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke - a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over more than a decade. In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway revealed to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the true part of each literary woman he'd later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which Hemingway stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice and champagne in the buff with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as you've never known him--humble, thoughtful, and full of regret. To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife - Mary, also a close friend - Hotch held back, keeping the conversations to himself for decades. Now, for the first time, he tells the whole story, mostly in Hemingway's own words. Hemingway in Love is the intimate and repentantly candid chapter missing from the definitive biography of a literary giant.

A.E. Hotchner is a life-long writer and the author of O.J. in the Morning, G & T at Night and Papa Hemingway, the critically acclaimed 1966 biography of his close friend Ernest Hemingway. Hotchner's memoir, King of the Hill, was adapted into a film in 1993 by Steven Soderbergh. In addition to his writing career, Hotchner is co-founder, along with Paul Newman, of Newman's Own foods. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and pet parrot, Ernie.

In this piercingly intimate new volume, A. E. Hotchner plumbs the depths of Hemingway's most poignant realizations and regrets - not just whom he loved and ultimately lost, but the very nature of his heart. A tender and devastating portrait...and one I will personally treasure -- Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife A. E. Hotchner is a natural storyteller, and it has been our good fortune that among his friends and acquaintances are bullfighters, glamorous women, talented actors, painters, poets, and interesting poseurs - people who attract and enlighten readers. Hemingway in Love is the crowning achievement in Hotchner's lifetime study of Hemingway, and I admire it immensely -- Gay Talese The first complete understanding of the writer as a man...an important book -- Library Journal (starred review) A portrait of triumphant highs, melancholic lows, and the pervading tone of the subject's generation-a human being's love lost -- Publishers Weekly Hotchner tells an engaging and harrowing story. . .offers us something of a 'behind the scenes' glimpse at how Hemingway was processing his past, and dealing with the lingering trauma of regret, physical pain, and his deteriorating creative ability. . .The final years of Hemingway's life have never been told with such eloquence and compassion * PopMatters * A. E. Hotchner's Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast. . .a book of elegiac charm * BookPage *