Authors, Writers, Playwright and Journalist Graves

Ernest Hemingway. Author. He was born at Oak Park, Illinois, grew-up in the Chicago suburbs while spending summers at the family’s waterfront home on Bear Lake. Ernest Hemingway was one of six children of a strict doctor, who gave him a passion for fishing and hunting, and a music teacher mother who cultivated a cultural knowledge of music and literature. He spoke often of his ideal, happy childhood. After his high school graduation, he began his writing career as a reporter followed by a dangerous lifestyle which bordered on the hair raising. At nineteen, he was almost killed by shrapnel while driving an ambulance in Italy. A wild-game safari in Africa saw him surviving two plane crashes in the African jungle, and during the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Republic forces as an ambulance driver surviving many close calls. His adventurous life provided him with material for many of his novels: “A Farewell to Arms,” “Death in the Afternoon,” “The Green Hills of Africa” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” deemed to be his greatest novel. Hemingway is also the author of a remarkable collection of short stories. His book, “The Old Man and the Sea” became a motion picture. The plane crashes, drinking, hard work and play finally took its toll. He settled in Ketchum, Idaho, his favorite hunting area, already suffering from severe depression because of health issues, finances and even the fear of losing his home in Cuba now controlled by the Castro regime. His worries here were groundless, as the Cuban government has preserved everything from his residence and even his fishing boat while constructing a memorial in Cojimar. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner followed in his father’s suicide footsteps imitating him by taking his own life after attending a dinner at a Ketchum restaurant at the age of sixty one. His funeral was a scaled down Catholic service because of his many marriages. His body was transported from the funeral home in nearby Hailey to a small waiting group of his immediate family and about fifty invited friends at the Ketchum Cemetery. Father Robert J. Waldmann, the local priest conducted a brief graveside committal service and the prolific writer was interred. His legacy is probably the best preserved of all American authors. His homes in Key West, Florida, Cojimar, Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho have been saved becoming popular tourist destinations. 

Edgar Allan Poe. Author, Poet. Most remembered for his influence on other writers and poets through his imaginative use of literary style and for his near flawless use of rhythm and sound in his poetry. He is considered the father of the modern detective story and the psychological thriller. Born in Boston, the son of touring actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe. When he was three years old, his parents died, and he was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who renamed him Edgar Allan Poe. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia, staying only one year, and running up large gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. Allan pulled him from college and broke up his engagement to Elmira Royster. Lacking means of support, Poe enlisted in the Army, but had his first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems”, published at his expense, and was able to pay off his debts. Reconciled with Allan, his adoptive father paid for his release from the Army and secured an appointment to West Point for Poe (USMA Class of 1834), but he dropped out after six months. His fellow cadets paid for a publishing of his book, “Poems” (1831), which contained his famous poem “To Helen.” Taking up residence with his aunt, Maria Clemm, in Baltimore, he supported himself with writing stories, which he sold to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and other newspapers. In 1835, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was 13 years old, and moved to Richmond, where he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He was highly praised for his reviews of contemporary writers, but this also brought him criticism from those offended, who complained to the magazine’s owners. In January 1837, the owners fired him as editor, but continued to publish his poems and stories. He moved to New York City, then to Philadelphia and back to New York, each time looking to establish himself in the literary world, but with only moderate success. In January 1847, Virginia died, and he became a heavy drinker. In 1849, he revisited Richmond, and was able to become engaged to his first love, Elmira Royster. Returning to Baltimore, he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street, and died “of congestion of the brain” according to the local newspapers. Popular lore states that he died of alcoholism, however, some claim that he died from exposure or from encephalitis. In 1875, a group of local school children donated a grave stone for him. In 1949, he was honored on a 3 cent US postage stamp.

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder. Pioneer, Author. Born Laura Elizabeth Ingalls in Pepin, Wisconsin, the second daughter of Charles and Caroline Quiner Ingalls. The Ingalls family traveled by covered wagon to short residences in Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, before settling in DeSmet, South Dakota, one of two families who founded the town. To help her sister, Mary , receive an education at a college for the blind, Laura obtained her teaching certificate at age 15. In 1885, Laura married Almanzo James Wilder in DeSmet, and their daughter, Rose, was born the following year. In 1894, the young family relocated to Mansfield in the Missouri Ozark Mountains, where Laura and Almanzo built the prosperous Rocky Ridge Farm. During World War I, Laura became a columnist for The Missouri Ruralist , with the popular and thoughtful weekly, “As A Farm Wife Thinks”. In 1932, she began writing the “Little House” books, an 8-part series, hand-written over 11 years, and delightfully illustrated by Garth Williams, based on her pioneer childhood and youth. In her books, Laura stressed the importance of family, faith, simple values, and self-sufficiency. The books have remained enduringly popular, continuing to be published and read worldwide today. After 63 years of marriage, Almanzo died in 1949, Laura continued to live at Rocky Ridge Farm until her passing in 1957, at the age of 90. In 1954, Garth Williams designed the bronze Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for presentation to Laura as the first recipient. The medal, administered by the Association for Library Service to Children, is an annual award presented to “an author or illustrator whose books, written in the United States, have made, over the years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.” There are museums across the United States at the sites where the Ingalls and Wilder families lived, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum at Rocky Ridge Farm, where the home that Laura and Almanzo built by hand has been preserved just as when the Wilders’ were in residence. Laura and Almanzo’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, became a noted novelist and political writer.

Rose Wilder Lane. Author. Known for her short stories, novels, and political essays during the early twentieth century. Daughter of author Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Katharine Lee Bates. Poetess, Author, Educator. The author of the lyrics to “America the Beautiful”. She was an esteemed academic and writer of stories, articles, poems as well as even children’s plays and verses. “America the Beautiful” first appeared In print in “The Congregationalist,” a weekly journal, on July 4, 1895. It is considered by some to be America’s unofficial second national anthem and those four stanzas, hastily scribbled into a notebook on a trip to the Western Plains in 1893, would attain great fame. At the apex of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she was so moved by the beauty that was her country, that she wrote what later became “America the Beautiful.” While lecturing at the summer session at Colorado College, sahe joined an expedition to the summit of Pikes Peak In a prairie wagon. She wrote, “It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse…” and found her ultimate inspiration. After some revision, the new version was published in “The Boston Evening Transcript” on November 19, 1904. Much criticism of the lyric poem centered on her use of the word “beautiful,” which some called hackneyed, but she refused to change that word, for she claimed it best described America. Following the 1904 publication, part of the third stanza was altered, thereafter, the poem stayed the same and Bates retained the copyright, protecting it from misprints and further changes. The only payment she ever received for her efforts was a small check from “The Congregationalist” when the poem was first published. In 1926, the National Federation of Music Clubs held a contest to put the poem to music, but none of the entries were judged to be adequate. The poem has been sung to a variety of music, and she never chose a preferred tune. Today, the song sung to Samuel A. Ward’s “Materna”. Also in 1926, a strong push was made to adopt the hymn as the national anthem. The “Star-Spangled Banner” won instead on March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed a bill proclaiming it the official National Anthem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Author, Poet. His family was a repository where the Unitarians obtained their ministers. Most of his forefathers and even his own father and finally he became a Clergyman. However, the death of his first wife soon after their marriage soured his faith and he resigned emerging as the leader of the Transcendental movement. (stressed a life style of a personal nature over rational or dogmatic-It favored trusting one’s instincts over the guidance of authority} This philosophy was the basis of his writings, essays and poems. Emerson started and edited “The Dial,” a Transcendental journal. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured often and his subjects and messages resulted in publication of “Essays” and finally the most famous, “Self Reliance.” He was productive for forty years, publishing his thoughts and philosophy in the forms of Essays, journals and poems and sayings. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Author. One of the most celebrated of American writers, famed for his evocative stories of the 1920s. He is usually credited with coining the term “The Jazz Age” to describe that era, which he defined as “a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”. The implications of this simmer beneath the alluring surfaces of his fiction, where hedonistic youth and the idle rich party relentlessly to escape the moral and spiritual emptiness of their lives. And it found its most eloquent expression in “The Great Gatsby” (1925), frequently cited as among the finest novels of 20th Century literature. Fitzgerald was both a flamboyant participant and a detached observer of the high life he wrote about, giving his work its unique perspective. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, a namesake and distant cousin of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. He studied at Princeton without earning a degree, and served in the US Army during World War I but was not sent overseas. He spent much of this time working on his first novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), which made him immediately famous. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a prominent Alabama judge; their daughter Frances Scott, nicknamed “Scottie”, was born in 1921. Fitzgerald solidified his reputation with his second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned” (1922), and the short story collections “Flappers and Philosophers” (1920) and “Tales of the Jazz Age” (1922), in which he chronicled the mood and manners of the time. Although he preferred writing novels, stories provided his main source of income and he produced over 150 tales for such fashionable magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, and The Smart Set. Some have survived as classics, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, “The Rich Boy”, “Benediction”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, and “Babylon Revisited”. Following the failure of his play “The Vegetable” (1923), Fitzgerald made a conscious effort to do his best with “The Great Gatsby”. The title character, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, has amassed a fortune through bootlegging and throws spectacular parties at his Long Island estate in hopes of winning the love of Daisy Buchanan, a scion of old money with whom he’d had an affair before the war. The book’s various plot strands are observed at a distance by the narrator, Nick Carraway (a Midwesterner like Fitzgerald), and as he recounts the events which lead to Gatsby’s tragic end, wealthy society is exposed in all its shallowness and false glamor. “The Great Gatsby” was not what Fitzgerald fans were expecting from him. T.S. Eliot hailed it as “The first step American fiction has taken since Henry James”, but its otherwise disappointing reviews and sales were a serious blow to the author’s aspirations. After the publication of the story collection “All the Sad Young Men” (1926), another Fitzgerald book would not appear for eight years, a period which saw the gradual decline of his personal and professional life. From the start of their marriage Fitzgerald and Zelda had plunged into a frenetic life of lavish spending and hellraising, cutting a swath through New York, Long Island, Washington, D.C., and the French Riviera, spurred on by their celebrity and view of themselves as “Jazz Age” representatives. But by the close of the 1920s Fitzgerald’s severe alcoholism and Zelda’s increasingly erratic behavior brought the party to an end. In 1930 Zelda was diagnosed as schizophrenic and after 1932 she would spend the rest of her life in East Coast sanitariums. The traumatic dissolution of their relationship is reflected in Fitzgerald’s most ambitious novel, “Tender Is the Night” (1934), about a psychiatrist’s destructive marriage to one of his patients, set among bored, wealthy expatriates in postwar Europe. It was poorly received in Depression-era America, as was the volume of stories “Taps at Reveille” (1935), triggering an emotional breakdown Fitzgerald candidly described in his long essay “The Crack-Up” (1936). Deeply in debt, he went to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a screenwriter, though not very successfully. (He received only one screen credit, for the 1938 MGM film “Three Comrades”, and was among the legion of scribes who tinkered with the script for “Gone With the Wind”). His last series of stories centered on the misadventures of a drunken has-been screenwriter named Pat Hobby, which are viewed as a mocking caricature of the author himself on the loose in the Tinseltown he loathed. He found some fleeting happiness with his lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and managed to stay sober in his final year, though this came too late to restore his failing health. When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack (his second) at the age of 44, he was written off as a relic of the Roaring Twenties who had squandered his early promise on personal excess. He left behind a 40,000-word draft of a Hollywood novel that was published as “The Last Tycoon” (1941); even in its unfinished state it showed that his creative powers had not diminished, and some present day critics rate it higher than “Gatsby”. Thanks in part to the efforts of his friend Edmund Wilson, who edited “The Last Tycoon” and lobbied to get his remaindered works back into print, Fitzgerald’s posthumous fame virtually exploded after World War II. The first major biography, Arthur Mizener’s “The Far Side of Paradise” (1951), was followed by Sheilah Graham’s bestselling memoir “Beloved Infidel” (1958), which in turn became a 1959 Hollywood movie (with Gregory Peck playing Fitzgerald). His writings have long since won him the acclaim he had yearned for when he was alive.

Washington Irving. Author. A short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book writer, biographer, attorney, and columnist, he was born in New York City as the youngest of 11 children. He has been called the “Father of the American Short Story”, and is best known for works ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ in which the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane meets with a headless horseman, and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ about a man who falls asleep for 20 years. He wrote under the pseudonyms Dietrich Knickerbocker, Jonathan Oldstyle, and Geoffrey Crayon. From 1836 to 1842 Irving lived at Sunnyside manor house, Tarrytown, New York, where he died. In the 1990s the village of North Tarrytown was renamed Sleepy Hollow.

Louisa May Alcott. Author. She is best known as the author of the novel “Little Women”, which was published in 1869. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where her father, A. Bronson Alcott, was a noted educator and leader of a philosophical movement called transcendentalism. Her family friends and neighbors included the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry David Thoreau, and these figures helped her to form her ideas about politics and social reform. When she was young, she began work to help support the family as a seamstress, a household servant, and later, as a teacher. Her first book, “Flower Fables” (1854), was a series of fairy stories that she would make up to tell children. During the Civil War, she served as a nurse for the Union Army in 1862 to 1863, and would use that experience for her first successful book, “Hospital Sketches” (1863). Her first novel, “Moods” was published the next year, and in 1868, she became editor of “Merry’s Museum,” a magazine for young girls. She then used her life experiences to write “Little Women” which was initially published in two parts, in 1868 and 1869, which provided her with financial security. In this book, her family was represented by the ‘March family’, and the character of ‘Jo March’ representing her. She would continue the story of the March family in later books, “Little Men” (1871) and “Jo’s Boys” (1886).

Mary Murfree. Author. Tennessee’s foremost female writer of fiction. For 30 years she wrote under the male pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock. The subjects of her work included the people who live in the mountains of Tennessee, and the Civil War.

Bio by: kimshockey (reb)

Grave location found on Find A Grave Memorial 

Tennessee Williams. Playwright, Author. He is best known for the plays “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie”. After years of obscurity, at age 33 he became suddenly famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams’ most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame

Irene Williams Smith. Journalist, Country Music Historian. She began her involvement with country music when she served as the booking agent for the “Drifting Cowboy Band,” which was lead by her younger brother Hank Williams. In the very early days, she sometimes served as the band’s back-up singer and ticket-taker. After Hank’s death, she wrote for the magazine Country Song Round-up from 1955 to 1961. Maintaining a vast collection of memorabilia about her brother, she opened a museum in his honor in Nashville for a brief time in the late 1980s. Shortly before her death, she sold much of her collection to singer Marty Stuart who presented it in a large exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame. 

Joseph Pulitzer. Journalist, Publisher, US Congressman. He is best known as the founder of the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious awards in American journalism. Along with William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer created a new and controversial style of American journalism, dedicated to crusading on the side of people and as a spokesman for democracy. Previously the press usually spoke for the establishment and moneyed interests, but this new strain of journalism supported labor, attacked trusts and monopolies, and exposed scandal, fraud and corruption, both public and private. At a time when journalism was not considered a respectable way of earning a living, Pulitzer was committed to raising the standards of the profession. Joseph Pulitzer was born in Mako, Hungary, the eldest son of a prosperous Jewish grain merchant. Pulitzer was educated in private schools in Budapest. After unsuccessful attempts to join the military, in 1864 he emigrated from Hungary to the United States, landing at Castle Garden practically penniless. The Austrian army had rejected him for his weak eyesight, and the French Foreign Legion did not want him, but when he got to America the Union Army was not so choosy. He served as a Private in Company I, 1st New York Volunteer “1st Lincoln” Cavalry from November 1864 until the end of the Civil War. After the war, he settled in St. Louis, where he worked as a mule tender, waiter and hack driver before studying English and law at the Mercantile Library. In 1868 he was recruited by Carl Schurz for his German-language daily, the “Westliche Post” where he excelled as a reporter. He participated in politics and was admitted to the bar, but he practiced only a short time. Pulitzer joined the Republican Party and was elected to the Missouri State Assembly in 1869. In 1872 Pulitzer was able to purchase the “St. Louis Post” for $3,000. This venture was a success and six years later was able to buy the “St. Louis Dispatch” for $2,700. He combined the two newspapers and launched crusades against government corruption, lotteries, gambling, and tax fraud. In 1874, he was admitted to the bar in Washington, D.C., where he also worked as a correspondent for the “New York Sun.” By 1883 Pulitzer was a wealthy man and was able to purchase the “New York World” for $346,000 from financier Jay Gould. The newspaper, which had been losing $40,000 a year, was transformed into the first tabloid-style journal that concentrated on human-interest stories, scandal and sensational material. Pulitzer also promised to use the paper to “expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses, and to battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” In 1885 he was elected as a Republican to represent New York’s 9th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives, but he resigned a year later in 1886. Two years later he founded the “Evening World” in New York. At the age of forty, he had become essentially blind, but he still continued to run his press empire for twenty-two more years. In 1890s Pulitzer had a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst. Using strong headlines, sensational news events, cartoons and other means they especially tried to attract working class readers and immigrants. The “World” increased its circulation with a comic supplement and in 1895 the first full-page original ‘Yellow Kid’ cartoon in color appeared, created by the cartoonist R. F. Outcault. Pulitzer continued to promote investigative reporting and in 1909 the “New York World” exposed a fraudulent payment of $40 million by the United States to the French Panama Canal Company. The federal government indicted Pulitzer for criminally libeling President Theodore Roosevelt and the banker John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan. However, Pulitzer won an important victory for the freedom of the press when the courts dismissed the indictments. Pulitzer died of heart failure aboard his yacht, the “Liberty,” on October 29, 1911. Through his will, he left $2 million to establish the Columbia University School of Journalism, and following the example of Alfred B. Nobel, he established a foundation to award annual Pulitzer Prizes for literature, drama, music, and journalism. Since 1922 Pulitzer Prizes have also been awarded for cartoonists.

Arunah Shepherdson Abell. Journalist, Newspaper Publisher. Born and raised in Rhode Island, he founded the “Baltimore Sun” newspaper as a penny paper in 1837. Throughout the 19th century, Baltimore, Maryland had a number of newspapers, many of them were overtly partisan, such as the pro-Republican “Baltimore American”. Arunah’s “Sun”, however, despite its origins as a penny paper, had, by the late 19th century developed into the newspaper of Baltimore’s upper class. By 1864, Arunah was sole proprietor of the “Sun” and had sold his share in the “Philadelphia Public Ledger”, another newspaper he had founded. In his efforts to get news as quickly as possible, he made use of pony express, coaches, trains, ships, and even carrier pigeons. He established a new pony express route from New Orleans, Louisiana in conjunction with the publishers of the “New Orleans Daily Picayune”, during the Mexican-American War. Using this advancement, learned of the American victory at Veracruz, Mexico before officials in Washington DC, and he was the one to send the news o President James K. Polk. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the “Ledger” became the dominant newspaper for decades, but faded and ceased publication in 1942. In Baltimore, the “Sun” is still published seven days a week. Arunah died in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 81.

Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor. Journalist. He was the first full time editor of “National Geographic Magazine”, serving in that capacity from 1899 to 1954, and was President of the National Geographic Society from 1920 to 1954. He is considered the “Father of Modern Photojournalism”. His wife was Alexander Graham Bell’s Daughter.

Tim Russert. Journalist. Born in Buffalo, New York, he is best remembered for hosting NBC television’s “Meet the Press” from 1991 until his death. He concurrently served as political analyst for “NBC Nightly News” and the “Today” Program, and hosted the “Tim Russert” program interviewing prominent guests on MSNBC. Prior to those shows he was the the Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News. He frequently appeared on other NBC News programs and co-hosted the network’s presidential Election Night coverage. In 2005 he was awarded an Emmy for his role in the coverage of the funeral of President Ronald Reagan, and was the recipient of the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement. His Election 2000 “Meet the Press” interviews with Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore won the Radio and Television Correspondents’ highest honor, the Joan S. Barone Award and the Annenberg Center’s Walter Cronkite Award. In 2008 he named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He died of a heart attack at the NBC News Bureau in Washington, DC.

Mary Welsh Hemingway. Literary Folk Figure. A respected journalist, she is remembered as the last of Ernest Hemingway’s four wives and as literary executor of one of one of the most important estates in history. Raised in rural northern Minnesota, she graduated from Northwestern University and in 1932 joined the staff of the “Chicago Daily News”. She left in 1938 to marry a man named Lawrence Cook, but following the break-up of the brief union returned to the “Daily News” where, in an ironic twist, her boss was the second husband of Hemingway’s first wife Hadley. Mary moved to Paris as a correspondent for “Time” and “Life”, but when Paris fell she relocated to London, worked for the “London Daily Express”, covered Churchill’s press conferences, and married Australian journalist Neil Monks. In 1944 Mary met Ernest Hemingway and the two began a sexual relationship despite the fact that she was still married to Monks and he was still tied, at least on paper, to Martha Gellhorn. Papa had a temper and the sailing wasn’t always smooth, but after both got their divorces the pair married in Cuba on March 14, 1946. Their relationship was complicated and while they were undoubtedly devoted to each other it was understood that Papa could not financially afford another divorce. The couple lived at Hemingway’s Havana home, the Finca Vigia, and in August of 1946 Mary suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Hemingway was never an easy man to live with and by that time he was in decline, aged beyond his years by hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, heavy drinking, and hard living, and the duty of trying to mitigate that decline and hide it from the world fell to Mary. She put up with Papa’s drunkeness, bad manners, and verbal abuse, and, at what cost to her self respect one can only imagine, with his six year long infatuation with pretty Italian teenager Adriana Ivancich. Still, Hemingway wrote, working on a massive novel entitled “The Garden of Eden” which would not be released until 1986, long after his death, and then only with major revisions and condensations, and in 1950 publishing “Across the River and Into the Trees”, a work felt by many authorities to be his nadir and in which Adriana makes an overt appearance as Renata. Stung by criticism of his book, Papa became depressed and Mary had to encourage him as best she could; indeed, as he worked on “The Old Man and the Sea”, “Life” magazine, which had agreed to publish it, secretly hired James Michener to back-check the piece as they feared that what one wag had dubbed “Across the Street and Into the Bar” was now as good as Hemingway could do. Mary had to console her husband thru the October 1, 1951 sudden death of his second wife Pauline, a circumstance made worse by Papa’s guilt over having had a monumental long distance telephone fight with Pauline the night before she died. In the event, no one need have worried about “The Old Man and the Sea” as Hemingway had written a classic for the ages, providing “Life” with a one-day sellout of the relevant issue and Scribner’s with a massive best-seller, as well as earning him his only Pulitzer Prize. As her husband’s spirits were temporarily lifted by his success, Mary accompanied him on an African safari that would be fictionalized in the posthumously published “True at First Light” (1999); in early 1954 the pair survived two small plane crashes in two days with Hemingway sustaining injuries from which he never fully recovered. As he read his premature obituaries, he drank to ease the pain while his mood and manner degenerated from difficult to impossible. When Papa was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that he felt may have been triggered by the erroneous news of his death, he was too ill to attend the awards ceremony and sent a recorded acceptance speech in his stead. Thru all the difficulties, Hemingway continued to work hard on “A Moveable Feast” and “True at First Light”, and as rumors circulated that the great author was visiting the Mayo Clinic for electro shock therapy Mary managed to keep the facts from the general public. In 1959 she relocated with him to Ketchum, Idaho, and later that year joined him on a trip to Spain where he covered a bullfighting ‘rivalry’ between Luis Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordonez for “Life”, the notes to be edited and published in 1985 as “The Dangerous Summer”. Hemingway’s father, Dr. Clarence “Ed” Hemingway, had committed suicide in 1928 and he had written as far back as the 1920s that he would probably one day do the same; on Sunday morning July 2, 1961, shortly after his return from yet another trip to the Mayo Clinic, Ernest Miller Hemingway, sick, depressed, and old before his time, blew his brains out with his favorite 12 gauge Boss shotgun, Mary inexplicably having left the gun cabinet key in plain sight. As she had covered-up his illness, Mary, with help, covered-up his death, partly to protect his reputation and partly to enable him to receive a Catholic burial. The absurdity of a firearms expert killing himself “by accident” while cleaning a double barrel shotgun was obvious and Mary eventually had to confirm the facts to the world. In the aftermath, Mary became Hemingway’s literary executor, and thus was responsible for the publication of “A Moveable Feast” (1964), “Islands in the Stream” (1970) and “The Garden of Eden” (1986), though with help from Papa’s sons Jack (by Hadley) and Patrick (by Pauline). She also retrieved a vast treasure trove of personal papers left behind at the Finca Vigia at the time of the move to Idaho; by the time Mary wanted to get at the material the house had been nationalized and a travel ban to Cuba was in effect, and thus she called on Jackie Kennedy for help. Deals were cut, pushed along by JFK and Castro both being big Hemingway fans, and Mary went to Cuba and brought back what she wanted. Mary’s story is told in her 1976 autobiography, “How It Was”, in Bernice Kert’s 1983 “The Hemingway Women”, and in each of the various Hemingway studies. She lived out her days in Manhattan and died following a protracted illness. Today the Ketchum home is a museum, the Finca Vigia has been more-or-less maintained by the Castro government, the Hemingway papers are preserved in a designated Hemingway Room at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and Papa’s entire canon is still, and probably forever, in print.