Synopses & Reviews
From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.
We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities.
Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.
We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.”
Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.
Synopsis
The author of the award-winning
Sons of Mississippi now reveals Ernest Hemingway in a wholly new light.
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s highs and lows around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar. We follow him from Key West to Paris, New York, and Cuba, returning whenever he could to Pilar to exult in the sea, to fish, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as his demons grew in power, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson reveals a man of choleric anger nonetheless capable of remarkable generosity, who, even at the very height of his success, was sowing the seeds of his tragic death.
Written with sensitivity and keen perception, Hemingway’s Boat is a highly original and invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published 50 years after his death.
Synopsis
An account of the making of Ernest Hemingwayand#39;s The Sun Also Rises, the larger-than-life people that inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world
About the Author
LESLEY M. BLUME is an award-winning journalist, reporter, and cultural historian. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal, and her work has appeared in many other publications, including Vogue, Town and Country, and Departures.andnbsp;She specializes in stories on historical cultural achievements, and has documented seminal moments in the careers of Jackson Pollock, Truman Capote, and Ernest Hemingway, among other greats.
Blume began her journalism career at the Jordan Times in Amman and Cronkite Productions in New York City. She later became an off-air reporter and researcher for ABC Newsand#39;s Nightline with Ted Koppel in Washington, D.C. She holds honors degrees in history from Williams College and Cambridge University. Blume now lives in New York City with her husband, also once a journalist at Nightline; their first date was a bio-chemical warfare training session just before the 2003 Iraq invasion.