Papa Hemingway: The ecstasy and sorrow - Hardcover

Hotchner, A. E

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688020410 ISBN 13: 9780688020415

Publisher: Morrow, 1983

Synopsis

Book by Hotchner, A. E

About this title

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

About the Author

A.E. Hotchner is a dramatist, novelist, screenwriter, and biographer. He is Paul Newman's partner in Newman's Own. He divides his time between Westport, Connecticut, and Manhattan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Morrow
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0688020410
• ISBN 13: 9780688020415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 322