Free Republic

Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand almost 50 years ago, on July 2, 1961. His fame rests on his evocative stories crafted in spare prose, his tragic romances of love and death, his vivid war reporting and his travel books. He was an uneven author, but wrote at least one great work in every decade of his career. His description of the Greek refugees retreating after a Turkish victory—"Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats"—appeared in his first and best book of stories, "In Our Time" (1925). The novelist Ford Madox Ford praised...

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life. There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life. Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his...