Jack Hemingway

Jack Hemingway was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the only child of American writer Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson. He later gained two half-brothers, Patrick and Gregory, from Hemingway's marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer.

Throughout his life, Jack was considered by many to bear a strong physical resemblance to his father,[1] but was more like his mother in temperament: "good-natured and even-tempered, and not particularly driven".[2] He was named for his mother, and for the Spanish matador Nicanor Villalta y Serrés, whom his father admired.[3] Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were his godparents.[4] Nicknamed Bumby as a toddler by his mother "because of his plump teddy-bear qualities",[5] he spent his early years in Paris and the Austrian Alps.[4][6]

Hemingway attended the University of Montana and Dartmouth College, but never graduated, instead enlisting in the U.S. Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.[6] Known for his sense of humor, in late 1943 at Camp Shanks near Orangeburg, New York, he overheard two older men (one of whom he recognized) in a bar arguing over who was the better writer, Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner. Jack interrupted, and said in his opinion, there was "a writer that was a better storyteller than either Hemingway or Faulkner – Maurice Walsh". One of the men said, "'I am Maurice Walsh," to which Hemingway responded, "I'm Jack Hemingway ... pleased to meet you."[2]

Assigned overseas to France in 1944, he started as a military police officer commanding a special unit of black soldiers, and later obtained a transfer into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the newly formed U.S. wartime intelligence agency that evolved into the CIA after the war.[2] As a French-speaking First Lieutenant with the OSS, he worked with the French Resistance.[6] Characteristic of his sense of daring, he parachuted into occupied France with his fly rod, reel and flies,[2] and was almost captured by a German patrol while fishing after his first mission.[7] While on a leave in Algiers, he met with his father's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, whom Jack called his "favorite other mother", who was on her way to Italy to work as a war correspondent with the French Forces.[2]

In France in late October 1944, Hemingway was wounded and captured by the Germans[1] behind enemy lines in the Vosges,[8] and was held as a POW (prisoner-of-war) at Moosburg Prison Camp until April 1945.[9] While a POW, he lost 70 lbs., dropping from 210 lbs. to 140 lbs.[2] Upon his release, he was flown to Paris in time to join the mobs celebrating VE-Day on May 8, 1945 in the Champs Elysees so beloved by his parents,[2] and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the government of France for his wartime service.[10]

After the war, he was stationed briefly in West Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,[10] before leaving the army. After his discharge, and back in civilian life, he worked as a stockbroker, and then as a fishing supplies salesman.[6] In 1967, he retired and returned to live in Ketchum, Idaho, his father's last home and burial place. There he taught languages, pursued his passion for fly fishing, and wrote two autobiographical books.[1]

Hemingway married Byra Louise "Puck" Whittlesey on June 25, 1949, in Paris. Their wedding was attended by Julia Child and Alice B. Toklas.[4] The couple had three children: Joan Whittlesey "Muffet" Hemingway[lower-alpha 1] (born 1950), Margot Louise Hemingway later known as Margaux Hemingway (1954–1996), and Mariel Hadley Hemingway (born 1961).[9]

Puck died of cancer in 1988.[4] In 1989, Hemingway married Angela Holvey; they remained married until his death in 2000.[6]

Margaux died of a barbiturate overdose in 1996 at age 42, her death ruled self-inflicted, thereby becoming "the fifth person in four generations of her family to commit suicide".[12] In a 2013 television documentary film Running from Crazy,[13] Mariel spoke of her family's struggles with alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide.[14][15] In early 2013, Mariel Hemingway, Jack's third daughter, claimed that Jack sexually abused her two older sisters.[16]

Throughout his life, Jack Hemingway was an avid fly fisherman.[4] He fished "most of North America's great trout streams", and several of the world's best salmon rivers, such as the Lærdalselvi River in Norway.[7]

A long-time resident of Idaho,[10] Hemingway lived in Ketchum, Idaho. From 1971 to 1977, he was a commissioner on the Idaho Fish and Game Commission. Idaho's trout stocks increased as a result of Hemingway's success in getting the state to adopt a catch and release fishing law.[6] His work with The Nature Conservancy was instrumental in preserving Silver Creek near Sun Valley, Idaho as one of Idaho's premier trout streams.[17]

Jack Hemingway assisted his father's fourth wife and widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, with final editing before publication of A Moveable Feast (1964),[4] his father's memoir of life in 1920s Paris, which was published three years after Ernest Hemingway's death.

Jack Hemingway also published an autobiography, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa, in 1986. A second autobiographical work, A Life Worth Living: The Adventures of a Passionate Sportsman, was released posthumously in 2002.

Jack Hemingway died on December 1, 2000 at age 77 from complications following heart surgery in New York City.[6] He had previously suffered a heart attack at around age 44.[18] In 2001, the state of Idaho designated an annual "Jack Hemingway Conservation Day" in his honor.[19] He is buried in Idaho at the Ketchum Cemetery, next to his wife Puck, daughter Margaux, father Ernest, and half-brother Gregory.

• Hemingway, Jack (1986). Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa. Dallas: Taylor Pub. Co. ISBN 0-8783-3379-7
• Hemingway, Jack (2002). A Life Worth Living: The Adventures of a Passionate Sportsman. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press. ISBN 1-58574-325-9

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jack Hemingway.

• "Obituary: Jack Hemingway" from The Guardian
• Last Interview, at sunvalleyguide.com.
• Jack Hemingway at Find a Grave