Ernest Hemingway: The Last Interview

& Other Conversations

“One of the bravest and best, the strictest in principles, the severest of craftsmen, undeviating in his dedication to his craft . . . To the few who knew him well he was almost as good a man as the books he wrote. He is not dead. Generations not yet born of young men and women who want to write will refute that word as applied to him.” —William Faulkner

An extraordinary collection of pugnacious, charming, and revealing interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning author who defined and transformed American literature.

Hemingway was not only known for his understated style, but for his public image as America’s greatest author and journalist—and for the grand, expansive, adventurous way he lived his life. The prickly wit and fierce dedication to his craft that defined Hemingway’s life and work shine through in this unprecedented collection of interviews.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, the child of a physician and a musician. After high school, he became a journalist with The Kansas City Star, before enlisting to be an ambulance driver in World War I. He returned home after a serious injury in 1918, but his military experience informed his fiction, especially A Farewell to Arms. He worked as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star during his first marriage, and over the next three marriages he would live in Paris, London, Key West, and Cuba. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two nonfiction titles. On safari in Africa in 1952 he survived two plane crashes, though his obituaries ran prematurely. He lived on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Two trunks of his early work from Paris reappeared in 1957, and inspired him to write his memoir A Moveable Feast. He eventually committed suicide in Idaho in 1961.

“Ernest…has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare . . . Always dangerous. Always in there with that right cocked. Real Class.” —John O’Hara

“He accomplished as few artists that have lived in our time, or any, the almost impossibly difficult achievement of becoming, as a man, in the sight of the world and the time he lived in, the embodiment of what his work meant.” —Tennessee Williams

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