Hemingway’s Attic

Hemingway’s Attic focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s years in Cuba from 1950 to 1952, and also tells the story behind the writing of The OldMan and the Sea from the contemporary viewpoint of writing in Hemingway’s attic from 1998 to 2008. One would think after all this time there is nothing more to be said about Ernest Hemingway. Much has been written on this man who changed American literature in the twentieth century. The studies of his childhood, sexuality, stories, novels, parentage, sisters, brothers, strange proclivities, brutality, genius, flaws, are many. But the two years in Cuba between his biggest failure, Across the River and into the Trees and his greatest triumph, The Old Man and the Sea, have not been covered. The narrative ride of his life from 1950 to 1952 in Cuba is a time capsule that brings forth the consequences of a life lived in an alternate world ninety miles off the coast of Florida. It is in these two years when he wrote The Old Man and Sea that Hemingway is at the most destructive, brutal, and tragic part of his life. No one has grasped the implications of this life that began when Hemingway abandoned Key West in 1939 for a life in Cuba and began to live a life by his own rules. By combining the view of a writer who ended up working in the most famous writer’s attic in America for ten years, becoming enmeshed in the business and mythology of Hemingway and meeting two of his sons, with the roller coaster ride of his years in Cuba, this book brings a different light to the Hemingway mystique.

William Elliott Hazelgrove wrote from the attic of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois from 1998-2008. His tenure there was covered by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, CSpan, USA Today, LA Times, PBS, Chicago Tribune, The Plain Dealer, the Globe and Mail, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He has a Masters in History and is the best-selling author of ten novels and seven narrative nonfiction books: Madame President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson, Forging a President: How the West Created Teddy Roosevelt (Regnery Publishing), Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair (Rowman and Littlefield). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.