Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Awards 2012
• Winner of Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize 2012

Overview

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • National Bestseller • A brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood. ""Hendrickson’s two strongest gifts—that compassion and his research and reporting prowess—combine to masterly effect.” —Arthur Phillips, The New York Times Book Review Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend. Hemingway's Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

Full Product Details

9781400075355

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p> I read [ Hemingway's Boat ] without a pause. . . . [It's] a biography that is at once admiring and devastating, and full of material that I wouldn't have thought even existed and of people who knew Hemingway whom I'd never heard of--an eye opener of a book, full of unexpected riches, fascinating digressions, and leaving one at the end wishing the book were longer, and thinking long and hard about the price of fame and success in America, and the dangers of seemingly getting everything you wanted out of life--it just may be the best book I've read this year, and certainly the best book I've read about an American writer in a long, long time. --Michael Korda, Newsweek Favorite Books 2011 <br> A lyrical and expansive search for the essence of a famous writer--heart, soul, and hull. --Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune Top Picks of 2011 <br> The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Ernest Hemingway's life, and through them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know. -- The Economist Books of the Year 2011 <br> Hendrickson's engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature. --S an Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011 <br> There's never been a biography quite like this one. . . . The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air. -- Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2011: The Top 10 <br> Rich and enthralling . . . Paul Hendrickson is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. .m

<p> I read [ Hemingway's Boat ] without a pause. . . . [It's] a biography that is at once admiring and devastating, and full of material that I wouldn't have thought even existed and of people who knew Hemingway whom I'd never heard of--an eye opener of a book, full of unexpected riches, fascinating digressions, and leaving one at the end wishing the book were longer, and thinking long and hard about the price of fame and success in America, and the dangers of seemingly getting everything you wanted out of life--it just may be the best book I've read this year, and certainly the best book I've read about an American writer in a long, long time. --Michael Korda, Newsweek Favorite Books 2011 <br> A lyrical and expansive search for the essence of a famous writer--heart, soul, and hull. --Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune Top Picks of 2011 <br> The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Ernest Hemingway's life, and through them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know. -- The Economist Books of the Year 2011 <br> Hendrickson's engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature. --S an Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011 <br> There's never been a biography quite like this one. . . . The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air. -- Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2011: The Top 10 <br> Rich and enthralling . . . Paul Hendrickson is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. .f

Author Information

Paul Hendrickson’s previous book, Sons of Mississippi, won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. Among his other books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (1992 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996 finalist for the National Book Award). He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the father of two grown sons and lives with his wife, Cecilia, outside Philadelphia.

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