Hemingway and Me

When Ernest Hemingway died on July 2, 1961, Mary Hemingway asked the Hemingways good friend, journalist Leonard Lyons, to announce the death of the Nobel Prize-winner to stunned readers and admirer everywhere. Both Hemingways admired Lyons for his fidelity to the truth, that he would get the story right. (As it turns out the truth was not quite what it seemed, since Mary initially denied that her husbands death was suicide.) This memoir recounts the quarter-century long friendship between Hemingway and Leonard Lyons, which eventually came to include Lyonss wife and three sons. In this short book Jeffrey Lyons recounts visits to Hemingway in Cuba (where Papa first taught him how to shoot a gun) as well as nights out with the great writer at such popular New York watering holes as the Stork Club and Toots Shors. Throughout the book Hemingway comes across as a hard-working, generous, and thoughtful man of letters, and not the gruff, hard drinking beast perpetually looking for a fight that he was often perceived as. This is a book about friendship, loyalty, and trust between a famed novelist and a working journalist and his family.