At the end of 1950, things were not going well for Ernest Hemingway. The reviews of his latest novel, Across the River and into the Trees, ranged from poor to scornful. It had been a decade since For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the feeling was that, as a writer, it had tolled for him. Some buried WWI shrapnel had surfaced in his right leg. Batista was back in Cuba, and if politics didn't push Hemingway off his farmhouse retreat, then the Havana suburbs would. Each day brought another carload of gossip columnists or biographers or moviemakers or, worst of all, university intellectuals -- trailing what Hemingway called "their usual PhD stink." And then, as he became fond of saying, "People are dying now who never died before ... FULL STORY »
