Lucasfilm continues with their release of acclaimed historical documentaries, produced by George Lucas for The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones on DVD, with Unhealed Wounds: The Life of Ernest Hemingway.
Writer Ernest Hemingway was strongly influenced by his World War I experience.
• Made by JAK Documentary for The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones on DVD, 2007.
• Producer & Writer: Karena O’Riordan
• Associate Producer: Mike Welt
• Editor: Marta Wohl
• Series Producer: David Schneider
• Executive Producers: George Lucas & Rick McCallum
Charlie Boice, center, winner of the 2015 “Papa” Hemingway Look-Alike Contest at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, prepares a Daiquiri at La Floridita bar recalling passages from the life and work of 1954 Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, in Havana, Cuba, Saturday, Dec, 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariel Ley)
HAVANA (AP) — Ernest Hemingway has returned to Cuba… in a way.
Eighteen white-bearded men who resemble the late U.S. author arrived in Havana to visit some of his favorite places when he lived on the island decades ago.
The members of the Hemingway Look-alike Society on Saturday visited the author’s favorite bar in Havana, “El Floridita,” where the music immediately picked up, and tourists and locals gathered around to take photos.
Earlier, they went to the San Francisco de Paula municipality and Finca Vigia, a former home to Hemingway that is now a museum. There, they played baseball with children.
“That is the reason for our visit: the kids and their families,” said Joe Maxey, from Tennessee, who is one of the bearded men honoring the author of “The Old Man and the Sea.”
The look-alikes arrived Friday in Havanawhen they took part in a ceremony at the Hemingway marina in honor of Diana Nyad, the first swimmer to cross the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to Florida.
Hemingway lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1960.
Bat Masterson, center, winner of the 2024 “Papa” Hemingway Look-Alike Contest at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, participates in a baseball game at Finca Vigia, recalling passages from the life and work of 1954 Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, in Havana, Cuba, Saturday, Dec, 6, 2024. (AP Photo/ Ariel Ley)
A man who pretends to look like the late American writer Ernest Hemingway poses for a photo recalling passages from the life and work of 1954 Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway at La Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, Saturday, Dec, 6, 2024. (AP Photo/ Ariel Ley)
Sparse of prose and generous with Martinis, Ernest Hemingway was nothing if not a literary and lifestyle legend. The iconic writer’s alpha male appeal has paved the way for no shortage of stories about his exploits — some canonical, like the three-month safari that resulted in a lion as a trophy, and others anecdotal, like his claim that he liberated the Ritz bar in Paris from the Nazis, or that he contributed to the invention of the Bloody Mary.
having a meal with Ingrid Bergman but not in Miami or Key West
Hemingway adored the water — a fact evident in his novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which would prove to be his last major work of fiction. He dubbed his 38-foot fishing vessel the Pilar, evoking the nickname of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a name he would also bestow upon the leader of the partisan band in For Whom the Bell Tolls. He regularly fished off the coast of Key West when he lived there in the ’30s, and he also made three trips to the Bimini islands aboard the Pilar, catching numerous record-breaking fish, including a giant tuna.
His love of the sea has inspired Salty at Sea’s luxury yacht charters, but Double Threat has perhaps an even more Hemingway-an vibe about it. This company’s fishing exploits run at a “tournament-style pace” that seems right up his his alley, and setting out on such an adventure yourself may lead you to similar philosophical musings as those that dot his Old Man and the Sea: “You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”
If there’s anything Hemingway loved more than writing and fishing, it’s drinking, evident in a 1935 letter to his friend Ivan Kashkin.
“I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure,” he wrote. “When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane than whisky?”
Fishing
For this world traveler, drinking establishments were some of the best ways to get to know a new place.
“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares,” he wrote. “If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”
Little Havana’s Café La Trova is an excellent place to start, evoking the Cuban culture that drew Hemingway to Havana in 1940; he would live there for two decades. The bar earned ninth place on the 2023 list of North America’s 50 Best Bars as much for the quality of its cocktails as for its ambiance. Here, drinks are thrown through the air, cantinero-style, with bravado and theatrical flair.
If you want to drink like Papa, owner and Maestro Cantinero Julio Cabrera has the perfect order in mind.
“I would serve him a Hemingway Special, aka Papa Doble, frozen,” he says. This play on a daiquiri features a double dose of light rum, maraschino, grapefruit juice, lime juice and, perhaps most essentially, no sugar for the sweet drink-averse Hemingway. It was originally crafted in Havana’s La Floridita, where he ostensibly once drank 17 in one sitting.”
The old man and the sea
“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast. “It was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.”
Snobbery aside, we’re not sure he’d be able to shy away from the sophistication of the rarities on this list, which has featured such gems as a 1995 Château Margaux.
But should Hemingway belly up to the bar, Matador bartender Michael Berland has another perfect drink in mind.
“Hemingway loved handcrafted spirits made with fresh ingredients and a very dry, bone-chilling cold martini,” he says. (A love evoked, by the way, in A Farewell to Arms, where Frederic Henry cites the tipple as his drink of choice, claiming they make him feel “civilized.”)
“If I had the pleasure of mixing up a cocktail for the late Hemingway,” says Berland, “I would create a familiar and comforting cocktail for him such as the dry martini, making sure it is exactly how he likes it: ‘So cold you can’t hold it in your hand. It sticks to your fingers.’”
From Miami, it’s just a three-hour road trip to Key West, where Hemingway lived with his wife Pauline from 1931 to 1939. The house where he penned Green Hills of Africa and To Have and Have Not, among others, has been converted into a museum in his honor. Explore the grounds on your own or with a tour, and keep an eye out for one of the approximately 60 six-toed cats, some of which are descendants of Hemingway’s own Snow White.
While in Key West, be sure to stop by Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway’s favorite local watering hole and notably where he met his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, whom he married after divorcing Pauline in 1940.
Many authors, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ursa Minor β: Megadodo Publications, n.d. Computer tablet and massive interstellar infrastructure.
A new exhibition on view at The Grolier Club next month will be part conceptual art installation and part bibliophilic entertainment, featuring a collection of books that do not really exist.
On view from December 5 through February 15, 2025, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books presents an alternative library that encourages speculation on some of the major “what ifs” of bibliographic history.
Curated by Grolier Club member Reid Byers from his own collection, the exhibition includes more than 100 imaginary books such as lost texts that have no surviving example, unfinished books, and fictive works that exist only in story. All of the “books” are simulacra meticulously created by Byers with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.
The display evokes a private library where visitors will find:
William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, of which no known copies survive
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, which vanished when his wife’s suitcase was stolen from a train at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, in 1922, never to be recovered
with Bumby
the Necronomicon, a magical textbook sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox as a precaution
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment,” said Byers, “confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space, for being magical, the book is not to be touched. It appears before us only to amuse, to prompt a gasp, a knowing chuckle, or the briefest thought of ‘O, how I wish!’. Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
On view are a wide range of lost books that we know once existed but of which no examples now survive. Some were intentionally destroyed, such as Lord Byron’s memoirs which he said detailed “the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation.” The manuscript was burned by his publisher in 1824. Other works lost to history but shown here are such risqué tales as Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Scented Garden which was burned at his death by his wife Isabel who thought it was obscene and would damage his reputation.
The first volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, which focuses on Tragedy and Epic, is the earliest surviving work on dramatic theory. The exhibition will offer visitors the second volume, On Comedy, which was lost in the late Middle Ages when the last surviving copy was burned in an Italian monastery in 1327. Other tragic losses include philosopher Pierre Abélard’s Poèmes pour Héloïse and the beautifully bound Poems of Sappho.
There will also be unfinished books, which were begun in some fashion, but were never completed or brought to publication, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Waking inspired from an opium-induced reverie, Coleridge claimed he rushed to write down his great poem, but only captured 54 lines before he was interrupted by a visitor. When he returned to the work, his vision had evaporated, and the book on view imagines what might have been if he had been able to continue.
Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel Double Exposure (1962) was at the centre of a fraught battle. After her death, Plath’s husband Ted Hughes and her mother fought over the manuscript, and it mysteriously vanished around 1970. The cover features a double portrait of Plath’s young heroine with one image seemingly blown away by the wind. In a lighter vein, Raymond Chandler jokingly threatened to write Shakespeare in Baby Talk under the pseudonym of Aaron Klopstein. It includes two of Shakespeare’s plays written in baby talk and an enlightening essay on As Ums Wikes It.
Fictive books exist only in story and never had any physical form of existence whatsoever. Two such books on view, featuring striking purple covers, are The Songs of the Jabberwock, first mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, with mirror-image writing; and the dark farce The Lady Who Loved Lightning by Clare Quilty, first mentioned by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
Magical books include The History and Practice of English Magic by Jonathan Strange and The Necronomicon, the most notorious of the Levantine grimoires (or magical textbooks), which has been kept sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox since the Crickle accident in 1968. Mentioned in many works by H.P. Lovecraft, legend claims that its use results in a horrible death at the claws of invisible monsters. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, displayed on a tablet using a massive interstellar infrastructure, is a guidebook for the entire universe and the most useful book ever written, even when it is wildly inaccurate.
A catalogue titled Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books will be available from Oak Knoll Press. The Grolier Club will host related free public programs, and a panel discussion during Bibliography Week on January 22, 2025.
The author Ernest Hemingway in 1939Lloyd Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
EXCLUSIVE: The life of legendary author Ernest Hemingway is set to become a ten-part TV drama.
LA’s Avatar Entertainment has secured rights to Mary V. Dearborn‘s Ernest Hemingway: A Biography and was at MIPCOM this week shopping the project to buyers. Larry Robinson, Head of Avatar Entertainment, will exec produce the series.
Dearborn’s 750-page biography follows the author’s life from his middle-class childhood in Oak Park, Illinois, to his life as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, his career as a journalist in Chicago, his life among other preeminent authors in Paris and the establishment of Hemingway as the world’s most famous novelists. Gersh represents the Hemingway estate, but Dearborn’s book about the author’s life sit outside of that.
The biography, which has received praise from The Washington Post as “the most fully faceted portrait of Hemingway now available,” extensively chronicles his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Cuba, Geneva, Kenya, Wyoming, Key West and the Normandy landing of World War II, and explores his Nobel Prize win of 1953, his four wives, multiple affairs and, ultimately, his suicide at his Idaho ranch.
Agnes von Kurowsky, first “real” love
Hemingway’s novels include For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea.For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms have over the years been adapted for TV and film in the UK and U.S., while Across the River and Into the Trees was adapted as a feature starring Live Schreiber and Josh Hutcherson
Last year, we reported Michael Winterbottom has been putting together a remake of A Farewell to Arms alongside Fremantle, with the likes of Tom Blyth attached. The novel has previously been adapted to the big screen by Oscar-winning director Frank Borzage in 1932, with Cooper in the starring role opposite Helen Hayes, and then in 1957 by Charles Vidor and John Huston with Hudson co-starring opposite Jennifer Jones. Hamilton and Vanessa Redgrave reprised the roles in a UK mini-series adaptation in 1966.
“I see Mary V. Dearborn’s definitive biography of Hemingway to be the foundational IP for an awards-worthy, super-premium TV series that will attract major talent both in front and behind the camera,” said Robinson. “The way Hemingway lived was the personification of ‘larger than life’.”
Avatar has become increasingly active in the book-to-screen business as demand for projects with established audiences grows. Robinson this year acquired rights to spy thriller Operation Kazan (Operacion Kazan) from Spanish journalist Vincente Vallés and had it set up at a major studio, though we understand that agreement is now over. He has also partnered with exec producer Stephanie Germain on a separate novel adaptation.
Mary Dearborn is represented by George Bouchard Agency and Robinson is represented by CAA.
Seán and Colette Hemingway will introduce this opportunity to hear about the creation and content of this exciting digital project from Hilary Justice, the Library’s Hemingway Scholar in Residence.
Designed as a “living website,” the Hemingway at the JFK project offers an ever-evolving exploration of Ernest Hemingway’s life, works, and legacy. The content, written and curated by experts, draws from The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library and from an international network of archives, museums, libraries, and historical societies.
The JFK Library stands today as the world’s pre-eminent research center for Ernest Hemingway’s life and work, with the Hemingway collection comprising over 11,000 photographs and nearly 90% of the writer’s known papers, including letters, drafts, and journals.
While Ernest Hemingway’s literary output is legendary, his love of alcoholic beverages is equally so. One drink, in particular, was said to have captivated the author so deeply that he enjoyed 16 of them in one sitting. While it’s often hard to separate myth from truth, especially when it comes to a towering figure like Hemingway, the consensus is that the writer absolutely adored daiquiris after sampling one at a bar in Havana, Cuba, albeit with a variation on the original recipe.
Spencer Tracy, Ernest and Mary Hemingway, and others at La Florida, Havana, Cuba, circa 1955. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
A classic daiquiri recipe features rum, lime juice, and sweetener (often simple syrup) plus a lime garnish. These ingredients are added to a shaker containing ice and then strained. It’s not to be confused with frozen daiquiris, which features the same ingredients but blended with ice. Classic daiquiris have a reputation for being sweet, which Hemingway reportedly wasn’t fond of. That led to a tweak of the ingredients typically included in the drink, which was dubbed Hemingway’s daiquiri or Papa Doble (as papa was a nickname often attributed to the author).
Ernest Hemingway’s substantial appetite for liquor had much to do with his suggested variations on the classic daiquiri. The writer’s version nixed the sugar and included twice the rum as the original cocktail. While undeniably potent, the absence of sweetness in Hemingway’s cocktail makes it rather one-note when it comes to flavor. Other recipes for Hemingway’s namesake beverage include grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur, which is derived from tart marasca cherries.
Hemingway’s boozy spin on the daiquiri wasn’t the author’s only alcoholic concoction. It’s also claimed that Hemingway invented a drink called Death in the Afternoon, a straightforward cocktail consisting of just two ingredients: absinthe and champagne (variations on Death in the Afternoon include replacing the Champagne with Chardonnay). Absinthe is a potent liquor best known for its herbaceous flavor, as well as its purported ability to induce hallucinations, thanks to the inclusion of wormwood. Hemingway’s invention even shares a name with “Death in the Afternoon,” the author’s ode to bullfighting, which was published in 1932.
While lots of tall tales surround Ernest Hemingway and his insatiable appetite for booze, one can gain insight into his favorite drinks by reviewing his literary works. To this end, the author talked about whiskey and soda frequently, which is a humble concoction consisting of, you guessed it, club soda and scotch whiskey. Other cocktails mentioned by the writer include negronis, martinis, and americanos, which feature sweet vermouth, Campari, and chilled soda water.
Writing and not drinking
There is one cocktail often claimed to be among Papa Hemingway’s favorites, with little truth to substantiate the rumor. Mojitos are commonly mentioned in connection to the writer thanks to a note posted inside a ’50s-era Havana-based bar, which stated Hemingway’s preference for the drink. As for the authenticity of the note, a friend of Hemingway claimed that it was not penned in the author’s own hand but instead forged to attract customers to the establishment. As a result, it’s not clear that the writer was truly a fan of the classic mojito. What is undisputed is that Hemingway had a real passion for imbibing and wasn’t shy about tweaking classic cocktail recipes to make them his own.
Major Publishers, Authors, Parents and Students Challenge Florida’s School Book Bans
Book Publishers, Authors, and Parents Are Fighting Back Against Florida Book Bans
It is Banned Books Week and MidPoint addressed it on September 25, 2024. Recently, Florida and Texas are the states in competition for the most books banned in public schools, according to PEN America. Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina are not far behind in the competition for which state is the most retrograde, revisionist, and racist, at least in the book-banning event of the UNWOKE Olympics. But now, the books are fighting back. In a landmark federal lawsuit filed last month against the Florida Board of Education by a group of the major U.S. book publishers, The Authors’ Guild, public school parents, and students, a challenge has been mounted to the Florida law that bans books containing sexual content deemed “pornographic.”
Classic Books Have Been Banned in Florida
As a result of Florida law HB 1069, hundreds of titles have been banned across the state since the bill went into effect in July 2023. The list of banned books includes classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, as well as contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Stephen King. Among nonfiction titles, accounts of the Holocaust such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank have also been removed.
The First Amendment Protects the Right to Receive Ideas in Books
Our guests today to discuss this lawsuit were Dan Novack, V.P and General Counsel of Penguin Random House publishers, the lead plaintiff in the case, and Judi Hayes, an Orange County Public Schools parent suing on behalf of her sons who attend public school there. Dan Novack explained that the law was being challenged on First Amendment Free Speech grounds, primarily because it provides for the censorship and removal of any book that is alleged to be “pornographic,” even though “pornographic” is not a term with a real legal definition. According to Penguin Random House, unless a book is found to be “obscene” under the U.S. Supreme Court’s legal definition, it is lawful, but, ultimately, whether it should be available to students in schools is a determination best left to trained educators, librarians, and a child’s parents, and not to random individuals of varying sensibilities. Florida’s law instead censors and removes the targeted book first, upon someone’s objection, then keeps the book out of school libraries, all while the book goes through a vague and lengthy review process, which may vary by county and result in inconsistent determinations around the state applying to the same book. Both Dan Novack and Judi Hayes argued that the decision of whether or not a child is ready and mature enough to read certain books should be made by their parents and educators, and not by an outside individual seeking to remove access to books from all children, which is the process the law currently provides. While the State may argue that it has the right to restrict speech in schools to further “pedagogical interests,” the broad right to receive ideas is fundamental to the First Amendment; that right should be protected to the greatest extent against State restrictions.
You can listen to the complete show here, on the WMNF app, or as a WMNF Midpoint podcast from your favorite podcast purveyor.
The Blue Collar Bookseller review: The Hemingway Hoax
Kevin Coolidge
Never trust a man who doesn’t like cats…Irish proverb
Uncanny focus, curious, observant, a dislike for being disturbed — they sit for long periods of time and sleep more than they probably should. Writers are a lot like cats. Complex, unorthodox, full of personality quirks, hunting when he wills it, working when it’s time — a writer is not a herd animal.
Now, I’m not saying you have to have a cat to be a writer, but the best writers have at least one cat. Mark Twain, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein — they all loved cats. It helps to have someone to understand that writing is a process. You aren’t being unproductive or lazy. You are cultivating stillness.
Hem drinks with Boise
One of the most influential and manliest writers* of the 20th Century, Ernest Hemingway, was a dedicated feline lover. Like most cat hoarders, he started with a single cat. A ship’s captain gave Hemingway a white six-toed cat, named Snowball.
Today, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum on Key West is a playground to approximately 40-50 polydactyl cats. Cats normally have five front toes and four back toes. Not all the cats at the Home have the extra thumb, but they all carry the gene, and can give birth to a Hemingway cat.
If you take the tour, you’ll hear that these kitties can trace their lineage back to the original Snowball, but James Nagel, a Hemingway scholar, claims that Hemingway didn’t have cats when he lived in that house.
“Hemingway liked cats but Pauline, to whom he was married, wanted peacocks. So they got peacocks for the yard … The time when he had so many cats was when he lived in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba.” The estate in Key West is just one of the many places trying to cash in on the writer and the cats associated with him, claims Nagel.
Hem with boys and cat
Regardless of where you fall on the Key West cat debate, Hemingway wrote some of his best work in this home, including the final draft to A Farewell to Arms and the short story classic The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I rather suspect there was at least one cat around.
Waiting, seeking, stalking — striking and feasting on the flesh of your thoughts to satisfy a primal need. You are a writer, and you must feed the hunger, and the cat. OK, you can get yourself a big slobbery dog**, but if you want to be a writer that is remembered, you need to get yourself a cat…
Cat in the Rain
*Hemingway ran with bulls, hunted, fished, went on safari, occasionally took a rifle with him, though he preferred his fists. He wrestled bears, rode sharks, and never shed a tear when he got a paper cut. This is also a man that named a cat Snowball…
**Don’t buy into all the cat crap. Jim Kjelgaard, Wilson Rawls, Jack London — all were dog lovers. Of course, if you have a dog, the stipulation is that you are an outdoor writer.
Kevin Coolidge is currently a full-time factory worker, and a part-time bookseller at From My Shelf Books & Gifts in Wellsboro, Pa. When he’s not working, he’s writing. He’s also a children’s author and the creator of The Totally Ninja Raccoons, a children’s series for reluctant readers. Visit his author website at kevincoolidge.org
