Writing with stylistic verve, great heart and profound insight in “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961,” Paul Hendrickson gives us a fresh way to understand one of the most written-about, fascinating characters in American letters: Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.
By focusing on the last 27 years of Hemingway’s life, and on their one constant — his fishing yacht named Pilar, after his second wife, Pauline — Hendrickson frames this biography in an off-kilter way that is more reflective of life as it is lived than so many sagas of famous figures that march, cradle to grave, through a life.
Hendrickson, who won both the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Prize for his book “Sons of Mississippi,” has found friends and characters — such as Hemingway’s cross-dressing son, a physician who died in a Miami women’s jail — but he doesn’t reveal Hemingway’s life as much as he illuminates it with his characteristic passion and intelligence, in a great match of biographer and subject.
— Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor
“Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961”
By Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 532 pages, $30
