One of our saddest American literary tales is the life of Ernest Hemingway, which begins with enormous promise and ends in depression, megalomania, and suicide at the age of 61. And although Hemingway sometimes behaved as though writing was a tennis match, down deep he knew that it was the search for truth and, at his best, worked very hard to achieve it, becoming the most famous and surely the most imitated American writer of the 20th century.
Instead of going to college he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver during World War I, was wounded, and came home a “hero.’’ Shortly thereafter he met and fell in love with Hadley Richardson, who had attended Bryn Mawr for a year but was summoned home to care for her ailing mother. By the time they met she had lost both her parents, had a small trust fund, and dreamed of becoming a classical pianist. In the biographies — and Hemingway has been singularly lucky in his biographers — Hadley comes through as pleasant and very much in love with Ernest, but shadowy. In photographs she is very pretty, round-faced, and cheerful, and in “A Moveable Feast,’’ which Hemingway was revising when he died, he says, “I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.’’
