This image is the cover for the book Hemingway in Love

Hemingway in Love

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

A. E. Hotchner

A. E. Hotchner (1917–2020) was the author of eighteen books, including the international bestseller Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1966); King of the Hill (1972), an account of his Great Depression–era childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, which was adapted into a film by Steven Soderbergh; and Hemingway in Love: The Untold Story (2015). In addition to his decades-long writing career, Hotchner was the cofounder, with Paul Newman, of Newman’s Own and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. His most recent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Brown, was published in July 2018 by Nan Talese/Doubleday on the occasion of Hotchner’s 101st birthday. He passed away at his home in Westport, Connecticut, in 2020.

St. Martin’s Press