Hemingway's BoatHemingway's Boat
Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
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Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, 1st ed, No Longer Available.Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, 1st ed, No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formats"Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961{u2014}from Hemingway{u2019}s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide{u2014}Paul Hendrickson traces the writer{u2019}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 Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway{u2019}s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer{u2019}s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity{u2014}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{u2019}s jail..."--Publisher description.
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- New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
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