The Boyhood Memoirs Of A E Hotchner

"Bound together for the first time, these two boyhood memoirs relate A. E. Hotchner's coming of age in the Midwest during the Depression"--Provided by publisher.

An intimate, joy-filled portrait and New York Times bestseller, written by one of Hemingway’s closest friends: “It is hard to imagine a better biography” (Life). In 1948, A. E. Hotchner went to Cuba to ask Ernest Hemingway to write an article on “The Future of Literature” for Cosmopolitan magazine. The article never materialized, but from that first meeting at the El Floridita bar in Havana until Hemingway’s death in 1961, Hotchner and the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author developed a deep and abiding friendship. They caroused in New York City and Rome, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, hunted in Idaho, and fished the waters off Cuba. Every time they got together, Hemingway held forth on an astonishing variety of subjects, from the art of the perfect daiquiri to Paris in the 1920s to his boyhood in Oak Park, Illinois. Thankfully, Hotchner took it all down. Papa Hemingway provides fascinating details about Hemingway’s daily routine, including the German army belt he wore and his habit of writing descriptive passages in longhand and dialogue on a typewriter, and documents his memories of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martha Gellhorn, Marlene Dietrich, and many of the twentieth century’s most notable artists and celebrities. In the literary icon’s final years, as his poor health began to affect his work, Hotchner tenderly and honestly portrays Hemingway’s valiant attempts to beat back the depression that would lead him to take his own life. Deeply compassionate and highly entertaining, this “remarkable” New York Times bestseller “makes Hemingway live for us as nothing else has done” (The Wall Street Journal).

Joe Garagiola remembers playing baseball with stolen balls and bats while growing up on the Hill. Chuck Berry had run-ins with police before channeling his energy into rock and roll. But not all the boys growing up on the rough streets of St. Louis had loving families or managed to find success. This book reviews a century of history to tell the story of the “lost” boys who struggled to survive on the city’s streets as it evolved from a booming late-nineteenth-century industrial center to a troubled mid-twentieth-century metropolis. To the eyes of impressionable boys without parents to shield them, St. Louis presented an ever-changing spectacle of violence. Small, loosely organized bands from the tenement districts wandered the city looking for trouble, and they often found it. The geology of St. Louis also provided for unique accommodations—sometimes gangs of boys found shelter in the extensive system of interconnected caves underneath the city. Boys could hide in these secret lairs for weeks or even months at a stretch. Bonnie Stepenoff gives voice to the harrowing experiences of destitute and homeless boys and young men who struggled to grow up, with little or no adult supervision, on streets filled with excitement but also teeming with sharpsters ready to teach these youngsters things they would never learn in school. Well-intentioned efforts of private philanthropists and public officials sometimes went cruelly astray, and sometimes were ineffective, but sometimes had positive effects on young lives. Stepenoff traces the history of several efforts aimed at assisting the city’s homeless boys. She discusses the prison-like St. Louis House of Refuge, where more than 80 percent of the resident children were boys, and Father Dunne's News Boys' Home and Protectorate, which stressed education and training for more than a century after its founding. She charts the growth of Skid Row and details how historical events such as industrialization, economic depression, and wars affected this vulnerable urban population. Most of these boys grew up and lived decent, unheralded lives, but that doesn’t mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Their lives offer a compelling glimpse into old St. Louis while reinforcing the idea that society has an obligation to create cities that will nurture and not endanger the young.

This collection, complete with black-and-white photos and unique quotations that cover nearly two decades of Hemingway's life, is compiled by Hemingway's long-time friend and traveling companion.

An autobiographical novel portrays the author's youthful days in St. Louis during the thirties and the impact of family and friends on his values and beliefs