page_title: Ernest Hemingway
section_title: Idaho and suicide
hierarchical_section_title: Ernest Hemingway / Life / Idaho and suicide
caption_attribution_description: English: Ernest Hemingway Memorial above Trail Creek in Sun Valley, Idaho. The bronze bust of Hemingway was dedicated on July 21, 1966, which would have been Hemingway's sixty-seventh birthday. A bronze plaque at the base of the monument contains the words, "Best of all he loved the fall, the leaves yellow on cottonwoods, leaves floating on trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies … Now he will be a part of them forever.
context_page_description: Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
  Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms.
  In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives.
context_section_description: Hemingway continued to rework the material that was published as A Moveable Feast through the 1950s. In mid-1959, he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life magazine. Life wanted only 10,000 words, but the manuscript grew out of control. He was unable to organize his writing for the first time in his life, so he asked A. E. Hotchner to travel to Cuba to help him. Hotchner helped him trim the Life piece down to 40,000 words, and Scribner's agreed to a full-length book version (The Dangerous Summer) of almost 130,000 words. Hotchner found Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused", and suffering badly from failing eyesight.
  Hemingway and Mary left Cuba for the last time on July 25, 1960. He set up a small office in his New York City apartment and attempted to work, but he left  soon after. He then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover of Life magazine. A few days later, the news reported that he was seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa." He was, in fact, seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. Feeling lonely, he took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having the first installments of The Dangerous Summer published in Life in September 1960 to good reviews. In October, he left Spain for New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment, presuming that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where physician George Saviers met them at the train.
  At this time, Hemingway was constantly worried about money and his safety. He worried about his taxes and that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts that he had left in a bank vault. He became paranoid, thinking that the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum. The FBI had, in fact, opened a file on him during World War II, when he used the Pilar to patrol the waters off Cuba, and J. Edgar Hoover had an agent in Havana watch him during the 1950s. By the end of November, Mary was at her wits' end, and Saviers suggested that Hemingway go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; Hemingway might have believed that he was to be treated there for hypertension.  The FBI knew that Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961. He was checked in at the Mayo Clinic under Saviers's name in order to maintain anonymity. Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo" but confirms that he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960 and was "released in ruins" in January 1961.
  Hemingway was back in Ketchum in April 1961, three months after being released from the Mayo Clinic, when Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun" in the kitchen one morning. She called Saviers, who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley Hospital; from there he was returned to the Mayo for more electroshock treatments. He was released in late June and arrived home in Ketchum on June 30; he then "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961. He had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer, and shot himself with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend".
  Mary called the Sun Valley Hospital, and a doctor quickly arrived at the house, determining that Hemingway "had died of a self-inflicted wound to the head". Mary was sedated and taken to the hospital, returning home the next day where she cleaned the house and saw to the funeral and travel arrangements. Bernice Kert writes that it "did not seem to her a conscious lie" when she told the press that his death had been accidental. In a press interview five years later, Mary confirmed that he had shot himself.
  Family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, officiated by the local Catholic priest, who beli
caption: Hemingway Memorial, Sun Valley, Idaho
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