The Hemingway Patrols

From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway spent much of his time patrolling the Gulf Stream and the waters off Cuba’s north shore in his fishing boat, Pilar. He was looking for German submarines. These patrols were sanctioned and managed by the US Navy and were a small but useful part of anti-submarine warfare at a time when U boat attacks against merchant shipping in the Gulf and the Caribbean were taking horrific tolls. While almost no attention has been paid to these patrols, other than casual mention in biographies, they were a useful military contribution as well as a central event (to Hemingway) around which important historical, literary, and biographical themes revolve.

From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, 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. 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. We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his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. We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.” 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.

From Omaha Beach on D-Day and the French Resistance to the tragedy of Huertgen Forest and the Liberation of Paris, this is the story of Ernest Hemingway's adventures in journalism during World War II. In the spring of 1944, Hemingway traveled to London and then to France to cover World War II for Colliers Magazine. Obviously he was a little late in arriving. Why did he go? He had resisted this kind of journalism for much of the early period of the war, but when he finally decided to go, he threw himself into the thick of events and so became a conduit to understanding some of the major events and characters of the war. He flew missions with the RAF (in part to gather material for a novel); he went on a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day; he went on to involve himself in the French Resistance forces in France and famously rode into the still dangerous streets of liberated Paris. And he was at the German Siegfried line for the horrendous killing ground of the Huertgen Forest, in which his favored 22nd Regiment lost nearly man they sent into the fight. After that tragedy, it came to be argued, he was never the same. This invigorating narrative is also, in a parallel fashion, an investigation into Hemingway’s subsequent work—much of it stemming from his wartime experience—which shaped the latter stages of his career in dramatic fashion.

Evoking the spirit—and danger—of the early American West, this is the story of the Battle of Beecher Island, pitting an outnumbered United States Army patrol against six hundred Native warriors, where heroism on both sides of the conflict captures the vital themes at play on the American frontier. In September 1868, the undermanned United States Army was struggling to address attacks by Cheyenne and Sioux warriors against the Kansas settlements, the stagecoach routes, and the transcontinental railroad. General Sheridan hired fifty frontiersmen and scouts to supplement his limited forces. He placed them under the command of Major George Forsyth and Lieutenant Frederick Beecher. Both men were army officers and Civil War veterans with outstanding records. Their orders were to find the Cheyenne raiders and, if practicable, to attack them. Their patrol left Fort Wallace, the westernmost post in Kansas, and headed northwest into Colorado. After a week or so of following various trails, they were at the limit of their supplies—for both men and horses. They camped along the narrow Arikaree Fork of the Republican River. In the early morning they were surprised and attacked by a force of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The scouts hurried to a small, sandy island in the shallow river and dug in. Eventually they were surrounded by as many as six hundred warriors, led for a time by the famous Cheyenne, Roman Nose. The fighting lasted four days. Half the scouts were killed or wounded. The Cheyenne lost nine warriors, including Roman Nose. Forsyth asked for volunteers to go for help. Two pairs of men set out at night for Fort Wallace—one hundred miles away. They were on foot and managed to slip through the Cheyenne lines. The rest of the scouts held out on the island for nine days. All their horses had been killed. Their food was gone and the meat from the horses was spoiled by the intense heat of the plains. The wounded were suffering from lack of medical supplies, and all were on the verge of starvation when they were rescued by elements of the Tenth Cavalry—the famous Buffalo Soldiers. Although the battle of Beecher Island was a small incident in the history of western conflict, the story brings together all of the important elements of the Western frontier—most notably the political and economic factors that led to the clash with the Natives and the cultural imperatives that motivated the Cheyenne, the white settlers, and the regular soldiers, both white and black. More fundamentally, it is a story of human heroism exhibited by warriors on both sides of the dramatic conflict.

In February 1861, the twelve-year-old son of Arizona rancher John Ward was kidnapped by Apaches. What followed would ignite a Southwestern frontier war between the Chiricahuas and the US Army that would last twenty-five years. In the days following the initial melee, innocent passersby would be taken as hostages on both sides, and almost all of them would be brutally slaughtered. Thousands of lives would be lost, the economies of Arizona and New Mexico would be devastated, and in the end, the Chiricahua way of life would essentially cease to exist. In a gripping narrative that often reads like an old-fashioned Western novel, Terry Mort explores the collision of these two radically different cultures in a masterful account of one of the bloodiest conflicts in our frontier history.

Hollywood in the Thirties: Nazi saboteurs, gangsters running gambling ships, British spies and diplomats, FBI agents, starlets looking for the big break, cheap hustlers on the fringes of the law, local cops—some are friends and some are adversaries, but all are involved somehow with Riley Fitzhugh, a private eye who’s wondering whether the death of an English aristocrat really was an accident.

In Our Time is the title of Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and of a collection of vignettes published in 1924 in France titled in our time. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord". The stories's themes – of alienation, loss, grief, separation – continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting and current events. The collection is known for its spare language and oblique depiction of emotion, through a style known as Hemingway's "theory of omission" (iceberg theory). According to his biographer Michael Reynolds, among Hemingway's canon, "none is more confusing ... for its several parts – biographical, literary, editorial, and bibliographical – contain so many contradictions that any analysis will be flawed."

The Godless Boys is the astounding literary debut of Naomi Wood, author of Mrs. Hemingway. Imagine an alternative England, where the Church controls the country and non-believers have been exiled to a remote island. On the Island, a fierce group of boys patrols the community, searching for signs of faith and punishing any believers. When a new girl appears, arriving from the mainland to search for her long-lost mother, the gang is split: one boy falls in love with her, another seeks violent revenge. The struggle between them will change everything.