HEMINGWAY IN LOVE – A.E. HOTCHNER

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.