Mythbusting Hemingway

Did Ernest Hemingway kill 122 Nazis during World War II? Did he box heavyweight champion Gene Tunney? Did he grow his hair long and want to be called Catherine? Is it true that he threatened to fire anyone who drained his pool after Ava Gardner skinny-dipped in it? Mythbusting Hemingway will feature answers to these longstanding questions and more. It’s fitting treatment for an author who won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, survived back-to back plane crashes, and played the cello. He really was “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” who once shot himself in the leg with a machine gun (while hunting sharks), got into a brawl with Orson Welles and survived a domineering mother who dressed him up as the girl twin of his older sister until he was 5. In this book, Hemingway myths—both true and debunked--will be informed by detective work the authors did for the Paris Review, Chicago Tribune and Huffington Post—although 95 percent of the book will be based on new discoveries. In addition, an original essay, never-before-published in a book, from Frances Elizabeth Coates, Hemingway’s high-school classmate, after whom a character was modelled his sexually charged 1923 story “Up in Michigan.”