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 five. 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 is based on new
discoveries. In addition, an original essay, never before published in a
book, is included from Frances Elizabeth Coates, Hemingway's high-school
classmate, after whom a character was modeled his sexually charged 1923
story "Up in Michigan."
