08/14/2026
Sixty-five years ago, on July 2, 1961, in the wee hours of the morning, Ernest Hemingway got out of bed, kissed his wife, Mary, whispered to her "Goodnight, my kitten," walked downstairs to the basement of their home in Ketchum, Idaho, retrieved his favorite double-barreled shotgun, walked back upstairs to the foyer, and took his life.
He was by far the greatest and most influential fictional craftsman of the past century. Many hundreds of authors of all nationalities—including 14 Nobel Prize winners—have stated that he was a major influence on their writing. Among his many accomplishments, he revolutionized the short story genre and completely changed the role of dialogue in fiction. Although his remarkable life often overshadowed his art, it was as an artist that he forged an enduring legacy—one that caused Ezra Pound to call him "the finest prose stylist in the world"; Wallace Stevens to praise him as "the most significant of living poets"; James Joyce to state, "Giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know"; and William Faulkner to say he was "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." Gabriel García Márquez wrote, "Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft—not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing"; Robert Frost said, "His style dominates our story-telling long and short"; and Derek Walcott wrote: "Hemingway’s prose is an achievement superior to anything in poetry—I include Pound, I include Eliot, and I include Auden. You cannot align it with the verse of Frost. You cannot align it with anything experimental, even syllabically with Whitman. This is the work of a poet who has arrived at originality at great cost. And finally, it comes into an ease that is the ease present in Troilus and Cressida or any one of the great [Shakespearean] plays." Both Ralph Ellison and Joan Didion learned how to write by copying out Hemingway's work in longhand, as Ellison put it, "in an effort to study their rhythms, so as not just to know them but to possess them." John Updike summed it up: "I suspect few readers younger than myself could believe how we did love Hemingway, and, after pity feels merely impudent, love him still."
Hemingway's su***de at age 62 remains a mystery, as do all su***des, no matter how much we think we can know. Like so many of our classic writers from the early 20th century, he was a lifelong, heavy drinker. He also likely had CTE from serious concussions in two 1954 plane crashes. In the second crash, he had suffered two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder, and a broken skull. He was also bipolar and beset by migraine headaches, high blood pressure, and diabetes. By the 1950s, his writing had noticeably declined, critics had turned against him, and many of his artist friends had passed. His favorite home, Finca Vigía in Cuba, was invaded by President Batista's thugs, who killed his dog. He welcomed Castro's revolution and the end of the fascist Batista regime, but he and Mary had to leave Cuba for good when Castro nationalized all properties owned by Americans. Finca Vigía was taken over by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of six thousand books and many of his manuscripts.
In 1959, his biographer A.E. Hotchner found him to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused," suffering from failing eyesight and on the verge of a mental breakdown. He was also justifiably paranoid. The FBI had been surveilling him since the end of World War 2, assigning an agent to follow him throughout the decade. His crime was that he had gone to Spain in the late 1930s to train the peasant Loyalists who were fighting the fascist dictator Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and that he had used his fishing boat to patrol the waters around Cuba searching for N**i submarines. Yet, he persisted, working on his memoir A Moveable Feast and a lengthy book on the Spanish bullfights, That Dangerous Summer. He was worried about his finances, his health, taxes he owed, his lost manuscripts in Cuba, and the constant pursuit by J. Edgar Hoover's agents who followed him everywhere--in Spain, New York, and Idaho.
Worried about his physical and mental deterioration, Mary took him to the Mayo Clinic, where he endured 15 sessions of shock therapy in December 1960. He was released, by his own admission, "in ruins," and he asked Hotchner: "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He and Mary returned to Ketchum in April 1961, where his decline continued and he was sent back to Mayo for three more shock therapy sessions. He was released and returned to Ketchum on 30 June 1961. Two days later, he ended it.
Mental illness and su***de ran like a river through the Hemingway family. His father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, shot himself in 1928. Ernest told his mother-in-law, "I'll probably go the same way." Two of Ernest's siblings, Leicester and Ursula, later took their lives, as did Ernest's granddaughter Margaux. His father suffered from hereditary hemochromatosis, in which the body excessively absorbs iron, leading to mental and physical deterioration. At the Mayo Clinic, it was determined that Ernest also had the same condition.
In Hemingway's first story masterpiece, "Indian Camp," published in 1924, the point of view is from a roughly 6-year-old Nick Adams, whose father, Dr. Adams, must perform an impossible emergency Caesarian operation using only fishing equipment on an Ojibwa woman in a shanty in the woods. The bloody operation is successful, but it turns out that her husband in the upper bunk had slit his throat during his wife's ordeal. As they leave the camp on their way back to the rowboat, the story reads:
It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.
“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. “It was an awful mess to put you through.”
“Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” Nick asked.
“No, that was very, very exceptional.”
“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”
“Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?”
“Not very many, Nick.”
“Do many women?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Don’t they ever?”
“Oh, yes. They do sometimes.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Where did Uncle George go?”
“He’ll turn up all right.”
“Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
The Hemingway reader can never forget that the day would come when the real-life models for Nick and Dr. Adams, like the Ojibwa father in “Indian Camp,” would each die by his own hand.
- Robert Paul Lamb, the author
Addendum:
"For we have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable. People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them. Also it is very hard to do. So what?"
- Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (1935)
{PS}
