When I was a kid I knew an old man who told great stories about Ruark, who spent a lot of time here. Still enjoy Old Man books.

ETA. For those who enjoy Hemingway try True at First Light, a fictional autobiography finished by his son and published decades later. African/hunting

old man and the sea and for whom the bell toll were fantastic

I kinda liked Ride The Lightning.

Also, for some odd reason, I always think of "Farewell To Arms" during Shark Week.

He was a spy for the KGB.  Fuck him.

The estate down in key west had a dozen or so of those six toed cats hanging out

It runs in my mom's family. Nasty stuff if undiagnosed and untreated. Mom has it, is 80 years old, and is just fine. Two of her siblings had it and died very young from liver failure. They didn't take care of themselves.

An avowed Communist (Hemingway is on the books as a KGB spy) is a "man's man" but President Roosevelt (TR) - arguably THE man's man - is persona non grata on ARFCOM because he's the OP (original progressive) who made national parks.  LOL.

Hemingway's short stories are probably my favorite works -  'The End Of Something, Big Two Hearted River' et. al.

Islands In The Stream is a very fine and true book.

Define avowed. Was he a card carrying U.S. Communist Party member?

If not, I would guess between the Reds and the Fascists trying to shred Spain at the time, he hated the Reds less.
And then there's that Allies thing that puts it into perspective for me.
Us and the Italians were allied with Communist USSR when Hemingway was blown up in Italy after volunteering at age18. (And us again in WWII.)

Anyway, I would have bought him a drink or 10.

I appreciate the fact that as someone who hated fascism he might have naturally gravitated to their enemies but it is claimed in the book referenced below that Hemingway was a KGB asset.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy

Well, he participated in WWI as their allie. I can't fault him now on what he did in the context of the time.
If he supported the U.S. Communist Party after WWII, he failed. I don't know though. Do you?

...

He drank daiquiris as he watched Che execute dissidents.


I know he seems like a romantic masculine American artist, but fuck him.  An enemy of human freedom isn't really an American.


 

Didn't know that. That's fucked up.
Good shoot if true.

For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

He saw the elephant and then went on.   But his Nick Adams stories were so influential in my life [reading as a young man]  When i came back from Afghan in 12 i took my camping tractor {BMW 1150GS] on a moto/fly fishing trip up the continental divide.  Started in NM and then went up CO, WY, MT--and then across ID, OR, and back down thru CA.  Went into town for more fuel and burbon and flies as i went.  


one of the places i made certain to stop and visit was the graves site of

His descriptions of any particular thing or situation were almost perfection.

So, please give us a self description, as perfectly as possible, of one being... unworthy.

How many toes does that cat have?



 

I was in Uganda a few years back and got to go up the Nile a ways and one of the guys on the boat showed us the place where Hemingway was supposed to have crashed his airplane, leading to the death of a friend.  Supposedly, this contributed to his decision to kill himself.

Is this bogus or does it ring true to those who know about it?

He did crash a plane in Africa somewhere, not sure if it was in Uganda.  He suffered from depression, one theory is that the concussions from this crash and other violent episodes in his life contributed to that depression.

Agreed.  The American Left (academia, publishing, critics and news) probably fawned all over him because they knew he was a Communist.  Even if you take away the reports about his working for the KGB that came out after the 90's, he was on the commie side of the Spanish Civil War. Screw him.

You're thinking of George Orwell.  And nobody really needed writers to train communist guerrillas in Spain since the soviets were balls deep in that shit from day one.



 

He crashed twice, the rescue plane that picked up the group from the first crash didn't make it far off the ground.  This was north of Lake Albert, if memory serves.

All this shit about Hemingway being a KGB "asset" is slander and horse shit.

Read the fucking cite--it's tenuous at best--and don't project your hindsight interpretations of history onto people living in the day-to-day.

Hemingway wasn't on the side of the "commies"--he was on the side of the workers.  Get your head around that.  Try to unspool everything that YOU know came later from what was known at the time.  World War II hadn't even happened yet--right?  It was the Great Depression and the government in Spain was democratically elected--and it was being attacked by fascists.  German bombers (with German fucking aircrews) were bombing Madrid, and the ONLY country providing support to resist were the Russians, and (according to Orwell's analysis) that support was cynical and half-hearted.

In 1941 the United States was not at war, and (and with pretty much every other democracy) was aligned with Stalinist Russia against Hitler.  We were providing Stalin/Russia military war materiel via the Murmansk runs.  The US did not enter the war actively until December 7th--right?

Don't project your rigid cold-war ideas about what Russia became (post WWII) onto the political sensibilities of the 1930's and 1940's.  There were plenty of honest people who lived through the Great Depression who thought some form of socialism was the way forward.

And don't idealize Batista's Cuba.  It was a whorehouse, run by the mafia.  It isn't all that hard to understand why a well-intentioned person might see Castro as a liberator and a symbol of hope in 1959.  Reality has a way of kicking you in the nuts for your naivete, though.

you should do your research before you post BS  On Heminway' s second  trip to spain he volunteered to train commie volunteers in the use of small arms and machine guns

time to do your homework,   not george orwell  I suggest the well written book  "The Spanish Civil War"  its as thick as the manhatten phone book, but you will be a better poster if you read it cover to cover

another apologist without the facts, no wonder america is in the state its in,  this thread has proven how the american educational system has failed us.      

Sort of, but it didn't turn out that way. I think Cuba would of been better off staying with Batista. Look at it now, it's completely destroyed.
 

I much prefer the writing of John Taylor and Peter Capstick, at least with regard to Africa.

I would've had a drink or two with him.

 

Commie sympathizer.  Literally.

I have one of those.
She can climb a tree faster than any other cat I've ever had.

but,but,but, look at it this way the island is full of all that equality............this is the gift of the Castro brothers, it is their legacy. Sure there was poverty under Batista, but now they can take comfort that their poverty had/has a purpose.

back a few commies in Spain, back a few in Cuba, and all of a sudden he's a sympathizer.

ON HIS last night as a free man, Ernest Hemingway's youngest son slipped on a demure black cocktail dress and made his way to a small private party in the upscale Miami enclave of Coconut Grove.

He introduced himself to friends as "Vanessa" and spent much of the evening in the kitchen, chatting with millionaires in country club attire. Guests say he didn't get drunk. He seemed to be in good spirits.

"The odd thing about it was, he looked happy," says writer Peter Myers, who had never seen his old friend dressed as a woman before.

"I'd say he looked about 20 years younger. He looked comfortable." But things took a rapid turn for the worse, as things often did in the life of Gregory Hemingway, a doctor who had lost his medical license, a writer who hadn't published a book in 20 years, a husband who had been divorced from four wives.

Less than 24 hours after he successfully introduced his female identity to some of his oldest and most respectable Florida friends, he resurfaced in the nearby community of Key Biscayne.

Perhaps he wanted to celebrate his triumph at a local bar, a friend says. Maybe he intended to take a walk on the beach.

What is clear is that at about 4 p.m. the next day, Sept. 25, the burly transsexual was seen parading down a main Key Biscayne thoroughfare, naked, with a dress and heels in his hand. Taken into custody by an officer who described him as "very nice" and perhaps mentally unstable, he was charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence.

After a medical exam showed he had undergone a sex change, he was jailed - on a mere $1,000 bail - at the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center.

On Oct. 1, his sixth day in jail, Hemingway, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart disease, rose early for a court appearance, began to dress and suddenly collapsed in his underwear onto the concrete floor.

Entertaining family, lul.  Thanks for the chuckle tonight Ernie!

I read "Old Man and the Sea" in middle school and read it with my then ten year old son three years ago.  I enjoyed it both times.  I went to Key West last month but did not have time to make to EH's home.  On a side note, fuck Florida and their never ending, New Jersey like toll roads.  

So was Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie.

Walk a mile in a man's shoes and all that.

The man appreciated a good drink, fine guns, nice typewriters, adventure, and was obsessed with constructing the perfect sentence. He was a man's man. I'm a fan.