Papa Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner, 1966

A marvelously personal and up close view of one of my literary idols based on 13 years of friendship and companionship that started when Hotchner was a young man working for a magazine.  The book highlights Hemingway’s limitless hunger for people (Ava Gardner, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Stein and Fitzgerald not to mention four wives), food and drink, and experiences that pushed him to the limits of courage and danger (hunting, fishing, flying and crashing).   Living in Cuba, drinking in Paris and New York, experiencing war in both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War, this was a man who lived life as well as wrote it.  From his birth in Oak Park in 1899 (shared a birth year with Nabokov) to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, Hem lived life.