Hemingway's Boat

Hemingway's Boat

Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

Summary

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'She'd been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years - which were his final twenty-seven years. She'd lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He'd owned her, fished her, worked her and rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagos of Cuba.'

Even in his most accomplished period, Hemingway carried within him the seeds of his tragic decline and throughout this period he had one constant - his beloved boat, Pilar. The boat represented and witnessed everything he loved in life - virility, deep-sea fishing, access to his beloved ocean, freedom, women and booze and the formative years of his children.

Paul Hendrickson focuses on the period from 1934 to 1961, from the pinnacle of Hemingway's fame to his suicide. He has delved into the life of Hemingway and done the seemingly impossible: present him to us in a whole new light.

Reviews

  • Rich, magisterial... Unforgettable
    Ed Caesar, Sunday Times

About the author

Paul Hendrickson

PAUL HENDRICKSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, and Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the creative writing programme at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.

Among his other books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, a finalist for the National Book Award.

He lives in Washington, D.C., and outside Philadelphia.
Learn More

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more