Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

This biographical memoir of the Nobel Laureate is “the first complete understanding of the writer as a man . . . an important book” (Library Journal, starred review). In June of 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited a close friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary’s Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke—three weeks later, Ernest Hemingway returned home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a saga that Hemingway had unraveled for Hotchner over the years. After a near miss with death, Hemingway entrusted his most meaningful tale to Hotchner. In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he gambled and lost Hadley, the great love he’d spend the rest of his life seeking. But the search was not without its notable moments, and he told of those, too: of impotence cured in a house of God; of back-to-back plane crashes in the African bush; of cocktails and commiseration with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker; of adventure and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him—humble, thoughtful, and full of regret. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master and invites you to listen as he relives the drama of those young, definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life. “A tender and devastating portrait.” —Paula McLain, New York Times–bestselling author of The Paris Wife