Papa Hemingway [Paperback]

A. E. Hotchner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 1999

Between 1948 and 1961, Earnest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

From Library Journal

Another portrait of Hemingway to coincide with July's centennial celebration. Hotchner was Ernesto's close pal for the last dozen or so years of his life and as such is able to offer a good deal of firsthand information and anecdotes, although his obvious admiration for the great writer somewhat softens his memories. Nonetheless, this volume is a standard, made all the better by the inclusion of extra photographs and a new introduction by the author. A must have.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (January 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786705922
• ISBN-13: 978-0786705924
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,534,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intimate Biography of Hemingway, June 19, 2000

By 

Jason Baer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Papa Hemingway (Paperback)

Anything I say here will simply detract from this wonderful book, so I will keep it short. I've read a number of Hemingway biographies, but this is unquestionably the best. Hotchner only new Ernest for approximately the last 14 years of his life, so if you're looking for a comprehensive biography, try elsewhere (I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending any of the other Hemingway bios I've read). What Hotchner can give us is a portrait of Papa (Hemingway) from the perspective of a very close and dear friend (Hotchner hunted and travelled with Papa, helped edit and publish his books and essays, and even named A Moveable Feast). And Hotchner is no fool. He knows that Hemingway had a propensity towards exaggeration, and seems to have a pretty good B.S. detector.

If you want all the facts, and want to know everything Hemingway ever did, read one of the opuses written by a college professor who got all of his or her information third-hand. If you want to know what Hemingway the man was like, read this book.

After finishing, I think it is fair to say that Hemingway's most tragic character turned out to be himself. Read this book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Literary Memoir, March 1, 2006

By 

Billyjack D'Urberville (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (Paperback)

Decades after publication, this book maintains its freshness and rightfully takes a seat as a classic literary memoir. Hotchner, a dabbler in TV and magazines without literary pretensions, keeps his eyes, ears and nose open and delivers the best portrait from life of this complex writer which exists.

Forget the criticisms about technical innaccuracies or adulatory tone; it is part of the game that the tutor, Hemingway himself, taught this tyro. Any lingering doubts can be resolved by looking at Hemingway's own Moveable Feast from this period. The name of Hemingway's game is creating literature, not scholarship or journalism.

The writer is engaged in the early 1950s and followed to his bitter end. Hotchner makes you feel the sadness and loss. Imperfections, foibles, and silliness are all there -- also some cool wisdom. And you can't match the scenery -- Venice, Spain, Cuba, Montana. Obviously a portrait of this clarity is going to cause contoversy and hurt feelings; those maligned have spoken in their own memoirs which of course are well worth reading, too, even the brittle but brave Mary -- Hemingway's fourth wife who became Hotchner's fully armed foe. No matter: she is memorably on these pages too -- immortalized as the tough prickly pickle she was.

It finally does not matter what you think of Hemingway or any of these people. "Getting it right and true" was Hemingway's code, so that the reader feels as if he were there and remembers it all down to the weather and the smells. The result is literature. The unlikely little Hotchner succeeded on Hemingway's own terms, delivering a searingly human portrait that the writer would never have been capable of himself, but certainly would have been forced by his own standards to approve.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the best book on Hemingway I read, May 12, 2000

By 

DR K RAJASEKHARAN NAIR - See all my reviews

This review is from: Papa Hemingway (Paperback)

It by sheer chance I got this book while I was in San Jose,CA. I read the entire book in 2 days. It gave me so much information about the biographical details, mental make up and lonliness of a great author at the fag end of his life. I reread Hemingway's novels after this which gave me an entirely new insight into the writer's mind as well. The final days of Hemingway are touchingly elaborated by the author. I will certainly recommend this book to any one interested in studying Hemingway.