Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

In 1934, at the height of his fame, Ernest Hemingway bought a 42-foot motor yacht, Pilar, from a Brooklyn boatbuilder. Blending poetic sensibility with painstaking research, this New York Times bestseller charts the relationship between writer and boat through three marriages, the Nobel Prize, and all his triumph and tragedy; how he sailed the waters from Key West to Cuba, and hunted big-game fish and German U-boats; and how, in 1961, the yacht finally slipped away from him, along with life itself.

Paul Hendrickson is the prize-winning author of Seminary; Looking for the Light; The Living and the Dead and Sons of Mississippi. He currently teaches non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at the Washington Post.