'The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway' is the subject of this complicated woman, Ernest Hemingway's fourth wife. Her story is one of an opinionated woman who smokes Camels, drinks gin, swears like a man, sings like Edith Piaf, loves passionately, and experiments with gender fluidity in her extraordinary life with Ernest Hemingway. The biography traces her adventures before she meets Ernest, the tumultuous years of their marriage, and evokes her merry widowhood as she shapes Hemingway's literary legacy. A celebrated wartime journalist during the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, Mary Welsh meets Ernest Hemingway in May 1944. He becomes so infatuated with Mary that he asks her to marry him the third time they meet, although they are married to other people. Eventually she succumbs to his campaign, and in the last days of the war joined him at his estate in Cuba. Through her eyes we see Hemingway in a fresh light. Their turbulent marriage survives his cruelty and abuse, perhaps because of their sexual compatibility and her essential contribution to his writing. She reads and types his work each day, and makes plot suggestions and becomes crucial as he depends on her critical reading of his work to know if he has it right. We watch the couple as they travel to the ski country of the Dolomites, commute to Harry's Bar in Venice, attend bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid, go on safari in Kenya in the thick of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and fish the blue waters of the gulf stream off Cuba in Ernest's beloved boat Pilar. We see Ernest fall in love with a teenage Italian countess and wonder at Mary's tolerance of the affair. We also witness Ernest's sad decline and Mary's efforts to avoid the stigma of suicide by claiming his death was an accident. In the years following his death, Mary devotes herself to his literary legacy, negotiating with Castro to reclaim Ernest's manuscripts from Cuba, publishing one-third of his work posthumously. She supervises Carlos Baker's biography, sues A. E. Hotchner to try to prevent him from telling the story of Ernest's mental decline, and spends years writing her memoir in her penthouse overlooking the New York skyline. A drama-packed and full-bodied biography navigating a partnership forged by careless love and deep darkness, we discover that Mary is a tiny and fearless dynamo of a woman. 506pp, 24 pages of colour and mono photos.
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