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Facing Suicide. "The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places." So wrote Ernest Hemingway in Farewell To Arms (1929) Hemingway lived most of his life as an outstanding outdoorsman whose understated economical literary style was male to the core. Like his physician father before him, Hemingway died by suicide on July 2nd, 1961. "What is the sense of ruining my head" he said of the ECT treatment in his final year that left him a wreck, "and erasing my memory, which is capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but...

It is a story of one man’s heroic struggle against the elements and often viewed as a metaphor for life itself. But Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Old Man And The Sea is the latest victim of today’s woke standards, with students warned that it contains ‘graphic fishing scenes’. Successive TV and film adaptations of the 1952 classic have been awarded U and PG certificates, suitable for children, but a content warning has been issued to History and Literature students at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, an area renowned for its fishing industry. Mary Dearborn, the...

“They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too…Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series. Could there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?” wrote Gal Beckerman in the The New York Times this month.“Subversive?” Ah! At least the term appears in connection with the docuseries. And considering that Ernest Hemingway eagerly joined Stalin’s KGB (technically the NKVD at the time), secretly contributed tens of thousands to the Cuban communist party and (literally) drank, as a spectator, to...

A new documentary on Ernest Hemingway - powered by vast but little-known archives kept at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston - is shedding new light on the acclaimed novelist. Hemingway, by longtime collaborators Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is premiering on PBS on three consecutive nights starting April 5. It takes a more nuanced look at the author and his longstanding reputation as an alcoholic, adventurer, outdoorsman and bullfight-loving misogynist who struggled with internal turmoil that eventually led to his death by suicide at age 61..........

Ernest Hemingway look-alikes are being used by the Florida Keys tourism council to encourage visitors and residents to wear masks to protect against COVID-19. The men, a former winner and five regular contestants in Key West’s annual “Papa” Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, appear in a short video that debuted Monday evening on Keys’ social media outlets, urging compliance with coronavirus health protocols. “We look at Key West as being our adopted town,” said longtime contest entrant Dusty Rhodes in the video. “Help keep it safe. Wear your mask, socially distance, wash your hands.” The piece was shot in front of the...

<p>The three-night competition, which had been scheduled for July 23-25, typically attracts more than 100 burly, bearded contestants from around the world.</p> <p>KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic has forced the cancellation of the 40th annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest in Key West, organizers announced Thursday.</p>

Don’t get me wrong, amigos. The “mainstream media” does not label gun-control-loving Tim Mc Graw’s upcoming tour in the same manner as does this column. Instead we read stuff like this:  “Tim McGraw to perform in (totalitarian) Cuba-- McGraw’s 2019 Memorial Day Weekend trek, dubbed “One of Those Havana Nights.”..The McGraw trip offers lodging in ocean-view rooms at (totalitarian) Havana’s upscale Meliá Hotel, where a box of cigars and a bottle of rum will await each traveler. The all-inclusive tour is designed to make foreigners' typical Havana dreams come true, featuring a ride around (totalitarian) Havana in a classic American...

NEW YORK -- The themes and trappings are familiar for an Ernest Hemingway narrative: Paris, wartime, talk of books and wine and the scars of battle. But the story itself has been little known beyond the scholarly community for decades: "A Room on the Garden Side," written in 1956, is being published for the first time. The brief, World War II-era fiction appears this week in the summer edition of The Strand Magazine, a literary quarterly which has released obscure works by Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck and others. "Hemingway's deep love for his favorite city as it is just emerging...

“There’s no politics here ….In fact, there's no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast, or critic, says Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University who is the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. "He felt that it was important, as a guest living in another country, that he be apolitical," Spanier said in an interview.” (Los Angeles Times story on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s mansion Finca Vigia near Havana, Cuba, May 30.)  Got it, amigos? According to the Los Angeles Times a former KGB agent living in a KBG-founded and mentored Soviet satrapy while...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says in a new documentary of his life that he is thankful for the life he's lived. "The American people don't hold Washington and the people who work there in very high esteem. We need to make sure that we give the American people what they deserve, and right now they're not getting it," McCain said in an interview for "For Whom the Bell Tolls," named for the Ernest Hemingway novel which McCain still lists as his favorite. "I know this is a very vicious disease. I greet every day with gratitude, and I will continue...

It was the most powerful hurricane to hit the United States. No, not Katrina whose tenth anniversary was recently widely noted. This was a much more more powerful hurricane with a much higher death toll. It was the hurricane that hit the Middle Keys of Florida 80 Labor Days ago on September 2, 1935 and since hurricanes back then had no names, it was known as the Labor Day Hurricane. There were over 400 official deaths, most of them World War I veterans working in three CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps building the overseas highway. Most of those deaths could...

KEY WEST, Florida (Reuters) - A game of cat and mouse is under way between the U.S. government and Florida's Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum over the fate of dozens of felines roaming the former home of the Nobel Prize-winning author

Can you imagine the reputation of a literary figure surviving the disclosure that he worked (however briefly and ineffectually) for Hitler's Abwehr? Yet Ernest Hemingway worked for Stalin’s KGB and nobody (among the “smart set”) seems to bat an eye. According to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev "the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name "Argo" in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London. This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale Univ. Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society.)"Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is...

Up till now, this has been a notably cheerful year for admirers of Ernest Hemingway – a surprisingly diverse set of people who range from Michael Palin to Elmore Leonard. Almost every month has brought good news: a planned Hemingway biopic; a new, improved version of his memoir, A Moveable Feast; the opening of a digital archive of papers found in his Cuban home; progress on a movie of Islands in the Stream. Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was...

A new U.S. book claims Ernest Hemingway was a not-very-effective spy for the KGB during the 1940s. The Nobel prize-winning author is listed in "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America," Yale University Press, co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev from notes Vassiliev took in Moscow archives. A former KGB officer, Vassiliev was provided with access in the 1990s to Stalin-era files, The Guardian reported. In the book, Hemingway is referred to as a "dilettante spy." His file says he was recruited in 1941 before he went to China, the book claims. He...

July 16, 2001/Vol 6, Number 41 The Red and the Black The end of the myth of the Spanish Civil War By Stephen Schwartz The Spanish Civil War—the conflict from 1936 to 1939 between the mainly socialist and anarchist militias defending the Spanish Republic, and the right-wing forces headed by General Francisco Franco—is often described as the last purely idealistic cause of the twentieth century. Certainly this is how the intellectual tradition of the Left remembers it. For radical writers, theorists, and activists in America and England, nothing looms larger than those days when pure-hearted idealists from around the world...

The Last Crusade: Spain 1936By Warren Carroll(Christendom Press/ISI Books, 240 pages, $15) WHEN THE HEROICS of the Spanish Civil War come up -- Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway's fictions or the effusions of various poets -- there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side. The strategic point is simple: had the Stalinists won war, then during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact from 1939 to mid-1941, they would have allowed Hitler to cross Spain and seize Gibraltar. Had this happened, the...

In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 300 pages, $25.95 In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the...

"It was right after the revolution," George continued. One afternoon, Hemingway told him, "There's something you should see." The nature of the expedition was a mystery; Hemingway made a shaker of drinks, daiquiris or whatever. They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town. They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew, the same time each day. It stopped and some men with...