Ernest Hemingway's Son Was a 'Larger Than Life Paradox'

Patrick Hemingway, the last surviving child of Ernest Hemingway who was inspired by his father to spend years in Africa and later oversaw numerous posthumous works by the Nobel laureate, died Tuesday at age 97. Hemingway, the second of the author's three sons, died at his home in Bozeman, Montana, his grandson, Patrick Hemingway Adams, confirmed in a statement.

• "My grandfather was the real thing: a larger than life paradox from the old world; a consummate dreamer saddled with a scientific brain. He spoke half a dozen languages and solved complicated mathematical problems for fun, but his heart truly belonged to the written and visual arts," Adams said.

• While brother Gregory Hemingway, who died in a jail cell in 2001, had a deeply troubled relationship with his famous parent, Patrick Hemingway spoke proudly of his background and welcomed the chance to bring up the family name or get behind a project he thought could sell or attract critical attention, the AP reports. In the 2022 book Dear Papa: The Letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway, father and son share stories of hunting and fishing and express mutual affection, with the author telling Patrick that "I would rather fish with you and shoot with you than anybody that I have ever known since I was a boy and this is not because we are related."
• As an executor of his father's estate, Patrick Hemingway approved reissues of such classics as A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast, featuring revised texts and additional commentary from the author's son and others. His most ambitious undertaking was the editing of True at First Light, a fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's time in Africa in the mid-1950s that the author left unfinished at the time of his death. Patrick assembled the 1999 release from some 800 pages of manuscripts, cutting the length by more than half.

• Inheriting his father's round face and stocky build, Patrick Hemingway was born in 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Ernest Hemingway and the second of his four wives, Pauline Pfeiffer. Because the author rarely stayed in one place for an extended time, the Hemingways lived everywhere from Cuba and Spain to Wyoming and Key West, Florida, during Patrick's childhood.
• "I was taught to hunt by my father on our trips to Idaho, and I learned to fish in the Caribbean aboard his boat, the Pilar," he told the New York Times in 2023. "I had a wonderfully privileged life, and I tried to make the most of it."
• After graduating from Harvard University, he used inheritance money to buy a farm in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where he was a hunter, safari guide, educator and forestry officer in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. He spent around 25 years in Africa. He was married twice, to Henrietta Broyles and Carol Thompson, and had a daughter, Mina Hemingway, with his first wife, who died in 1963.
• Hemingway managed a long life in a family haunted by suicide and mental illness: Ernest Hemingway's father, Clarence, killed himself in 1928, and the author did the same in 1961. In 2023, Patrick Hemingway said alcohol abuse likely played a role in his father's suicide. "Under proper treatment, he would have had a nice old age," he said. The Times reports that he laughed as he added, "Although there's no such thing as a nice old age."