Ernest Hemingway Signed Photograph.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. [A.E. Hotchner].

Item Number: 110913

Rare and iconic photograph of Ernest Hemingway with his best friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner hunting fowl. Inscribed by Ernest Hemingway to Hotchner, “To Hotch from his pal Mr. Papa.” Hemingway first met Aaron Edward Hotchner in the late 1940s when Hotchner was sent to Cuba by Cosmopolitan to solicit from Hemingway an article on “The Future of Literature.” Hemingway took an immediate liking to Hotchner and they remained close friends; Hotchner edited the manuscript of Across the River and Into the Trees, acted as Hemingway’s agent in several deals concerning screen adaptations of his novels, and edited Hemingway’s last significant original work, The Dangerous Summer. Hotchner played an essential role in trimming the excessive manuscript of 120,000 words (for the assignment which called for a 10,000-word article) down to 50,000 words and The Dangerous Summer proved to be Hemingway’s last significant original work, published in book form posthumously in 1985. In 1966 Hotchner published his profound and intimate biography, Papa Hemingway, which would go on to become a bestseller. From the personal collection of A.E. Hotchner. In fine condition. Double matted and framed. The entire piece measures 15.75 inches by 12.75 inches. Exceptionally rare and desirable.

Between 1948 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, ran with the bulls in Pamplona—and once Hotchner even masqueraded as a matador and Hemingway's manager in an actual bullfight. Everywhere they went, they talked. For fourteen years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared their thoughts and as Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene of the twenties, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction, Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa—in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, and in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961—provide the material for this utterly profound, and truthfully compassionate best-selling memoir about the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.