>> report on how low can and moderate income families manage money. and at ten, former speaker of the house and presidential candidate newt gingrich talks about his experiences with donald trump from the campaign through his transition to president of the united states. and we wrap up booktv in prime time with the author of "how to be a muslim." that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. [inaudible conversations]

>> well, good morning, and welcome to the 33rd annual chicago tribune printers row lit fest. i'd like to start by giving a special thank you to all of our sponsors. today's program is being broadcast live on c-span2's booktv. we're going to have a few minutes for questions at the end of the presentation. the audience will have to line up at the microphone to your right, and we'll let you know when the time comes. before we begin today's program, please make sure to silence your cell phones and turn off your camera flashes. and with that, i'd like to introduce our moderator, a acclaimed television documentary host, producer and news anchor, bill kurtis. [applause]

>> mary, we'll get right into it. >> yes. [laughter] >> i should have a moment of explanation. you may be expecting three people up here. stacy keach will not be with us today. on opening night, a one-man show about ernest hemingway, last week, i believe, he had a heart attack on the stage. it was one of those strange things that just, in his words, created a fog in which he didn't know where he was in the play, and for 50 minutes being old school and the tough hemingway kind of character, he plowed through trying to find himself. his good friend, director bob folds, when they came and ended the show, he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a mild stroke. but he is find now. fine now. and vows to come back in 2018.

so we'll have to put stacy keach off til then. but mary dearborn is the author of a a new book called "ernest hemingway," what else? she is noted for having a street in chicago named after her, dearborn. [laughter] [applause] but she was also particularly important today because this is the first bio in 15 years, the first written by a woman, the first to explore -- [applause] >> yeah. [laughter] [applause] >> it's the era of women, isn't it? there you are, that's the thing. but, mary, i'm, you know, we're all such fans. i was, i lived in oak park, so hemingway and frank lloyd wright were our two heroes in oak park, illinois. how lucky were we?

and there's been so much written that, you know, it's sort of like the guy telling the old joke among comedians, they're so familiar with it, well, tell me number two or tell me number three. >> right. >> and they all laugh. so what i would like -- you have such detail about these heroic moments that we're familiar with. i'd like to ask those, but also some new revelations about his mental illness, suicide. but we'll kind of coarse the river to that end. so can you tell us a little bit about the rather mild upbringing at oak park high school. >> well, yeah. it's a great town. i gather it was the first suburb or one of their first suburbs, sorry. what i found so interesting was

it was ec by distant from chicago and the des plaines river. there he is, his father would go out to the river and shoot things for dinner. so he was, you know, on the edge of the wilderness, and chicago minute a lot to him. he lived here several, in the city, for several years, two years. >> he was not particularly a big athlete, was he, in high school? >> no. strangely, a lot of things that you expect to be part of this hemingway, this mythical hemingway just aren't there. he was terrible at team sports. he didn't really, he liked boxing. he played tennis, which nobody really knows, but he wasn't particularly good at it. so you don't hear much about that. but, no, he wasn't. and the other thing that people expect to go with the territory is that he would be a womanizer, right? that he was a babe magnet or, you know? and he wasn't, first of all. i think beyond -- he had four wives.

beyond the four wives, i think he only had about six sexual encounters total. and we just think of him as being, you know, some kind offing, don juan, and he really budget. >> well, there were a couple -- and he really wasn't. well, there were a couple visits in cuba that you mentioned. marlene dietrich and ava gardener. >> oh, yes. >> my god, you know in. [laughter] there are a couple books right there. [laughter] and ava called him papa, and he called her daughter. >> yes, yes. >> so but sex -- >> there was a little stable of women that he had that included twin peeks, dietrich -- p twin peaks, dietrich, garbow. he flirted with them, and they called him papa, and he called them daughter.

you know, he kept that barrier up as much as he did. >> but he married the journalist. >> he did, finally. he had two journalists -- you know, three journalist wives. >> well, he was off in michigan hunting and fishing with his dad. there were early signs that his dad had problems. >> yeah. his father, depression really coarsed through the family. and his father had a couple of bad depressants, and then in 1928 there's a photo that i love of ed hemming -- hemingway in a suit look looking at ernest with the most admiring but befuddled look. and he's swimming in his suit, he's so up this. he'd lost tons of weight. and he killed himself two months after that. the quality of the depression is

something we don't -- most of us can't even imagine because it was really a sigh accountic depression. psychotic depression. the example was ernest, at the very end of his life, he was on his way to the mayo clinic in a little plane, and it stopped to fuel. and he had tried to walk into the propeller. like, that's psychotic suicidal depression. i don't know if the word psychotic is accurate, all i mean is that it was really beyond -- >> real, it was real. >> yeah. and very hard to get back from. >> maybe the more interesting character is his mother, grace. now, she was bisexual? >> i think so. i mean, she was a happy, you know, she raised a family, six children. pretty good marriage, though hemingway felt he, that she was -- she was a very strong woman. but, yes, she had a lesbian

affair with a boy student came to live in the hemingway household as a sort of au pair, and grace seemed to have fallen in love. and as you can imagine it, the whole family, it nearly tore them apart. especially her husband. and it died down. the affair continued, and actually after ed hemingway killed himself, ruth was married briefly. and then they lived together until grace's death in 1951. so, you know, we don't, we don't, we don't have absolute proof, but there are letters between them and letters between ed and her, so i guess she was. >> now you mention, i believe, or suggest -- or insin wait, i don't know -- [laughter] that ernest had some gender problems himself later on. >> yeah. i don't know if i'd call them problems. at the time they would be seen

as problems. he was interested in kind of gender boundaries and the slippage between genders. there's a book published posthumously called "the garden of eden," and that's about he was obsessed with androgeny. and the husband and wife cut their hair or -- he had a hair fetish -- to be the same length. and then they switched sexual roles in bed with another woman. he never planned to publish that in his lifetime. i mean, he did -- and i don't -- all of his wives he played games with, but actually what's relevant is the story of his youngest son, gregory, who became, he was a lifelong transvestite. and he became a transsexual at the end of -- or he had this surgery at the end of his life. very sad story, he died in the drunk tank of a women's prison.

but that's outside my biography, right? except that what's in it is that ernest knew about it. when greg was 13, ernest and his fourth wife, mary, fired a cuban maid because mary was missing some of her underwear, and they found it under greg's bed, under his mattress about four months later. he admitted it, he had -- all his life he had no, you know, problem with it. but for ernest, for, you know, we don't need to know more about greg's life except that for ernest to know that when his son was 13 and here's this image the ultra-macho, man's man, and he was living with this son, with this knowledge about his son. it's just fraught. >> yeah, it's crazy. we would call that the story that you did not, we would call that today timely. [laughter]

especially for radio and television. when did he begin to create this macho image? >> when did he begin to create it or was it created for him? be really, i mean, it's all happening together. and there's no question he did, i mean, he was a hunter and fish, serious fisherman from a young age. got into deep sea fishing. i think marlin was the real love of his life sometimes. was a bullfight aficionado. all those things, it started happening about the same time. and i think he did participate in it at first. but then it started to grow up around him x i think it did, i think it did tremendous damage to him. >> just to show you the amount of detail in mary's book, the

old man and the sea, they were filming the movie, he was consulted as an expert. they went out to catch a marlin -- [laughter] they couldn't get one. just when you want it, it's never there. so they had to go down -- >> to chile. >> off chile to catch the marlin. >> ernest said no money with a rubber fish ever made money. [laughter] >> also the other detail is if you've ever been to cuba, you will go directly to the florida -- [inaudible] where allegedly, as a matter of fact, i think bacardi now claims that hemingway invented the daiquiri. and so you sit there and you drink the daiquiri. in fact, it's not the classic daiquiri. he had two jiggers of rum, no sugar, and he called it papa doble. >> that's right. grapefruit juice. >> grapefruit juice, he had it in. so i'm going to try that.

>> i think the lack of sugar meant that you could consume more of them. [laughter] a sweet drink you can't -- >> well, he was trying to find limit, god knows. >> yeah. >> the -- world war ii. so he comes to the ritz hotel and encounters, you know, paris. >> yeah. >> and goes up and he's swinging around a machine gun. so i go into the bar, being a fan of hemingway. i like the hemingway drink. it was terrific until i got the bill. >> oh. [laughter] >> i think it was $35 for, you know -- at that time, which was years ago. [laughter] were those true? >> well, a lot of the stories about world war ii aren't true. hemingway sometimes claimed that he liberated paris -- [laughter] what he really liberated was the ritz bar. [laughter] but, yeah. i mean, war stories, what can i say? more of them sprung up around him, as you can imagine, than

even in other -- actually, there's a lot of war stories about the various corps or respondents, the reporters in the war -- the correspondents. there were rumors about how he tortured german soldiers that are just completely out off thin air. and that's something that started happening around him, and sometimes he'd come to believe it or believe these legends. it's another example of the legend itself rearing up and butting him. >> coming back. >> yeah. >> i'm going to jump through a number of subjects just to fill in. africa. he went there a lot. >> yeah. >> it seems. and during the famous accident, the crash, he was going to take was it mary? >> yes. >> mary. and this was her gift. >> right. >> and the gift was to fly down into uganda and, you know, sight see. and when the plane went for a third time over the falls on the

border of uganda and maybe kenya -- >> yeah. >> -- why, it crashed. >> he -- that really, that really almost finished him. he injured probably every organ in his body. but the worst thing is he woke up and there had been cerebral fluid from his ear. so he was in very, very bad shape. and this was on top of another, of a lot of head injuries. he never really came back from that. they thought he was dead, you know, that fantasy you have the headlines, papa dies -- >> actually in the paper. >> yeah, yeah. so, but he came back. he was a very diminished man. >> it seems like that was the beginning of the end. sorry. teddy roosevelt went down to the river in south america, went through the same struggle.

and they attributed an early death to that. >> really? >> yeah. >> really? >> but here was hemingway, that was his fifth concussion. >> yeah. >> and it must have contributed to alcoholism and mental illness. >> i think so. he had serious concussions, and every time he got up -- well, one famous time he was in london during early world war ii, and he was in a centrally-located hotel, i can't remember the name. but his room was like party central. and everybody brought in bottles, and he's drinking. i mean, he drank right on top of these. and, of course, he had to get out of bed then because d-day was the next week. but they were, they were serious, and i think today -- we don't know much about traumatic brain injuries. they're always different. the prognosis is different and so forth. and then they have that -- i'm forgetting the initials, but the football players --

>> cte. >> yes. where it's cumulative effects of all those cop cushions, and that's -- concussions x that's really dire. yeah, alcoholic, he had these brain injuries, and he was on a lot of prescribed medications that in different combinations and, you know, the usual thing when there's a lot. and he had some physical problems like blood pressure and so forth. on top of alcohol, on top of -- >> he was overweight. >> yes, he became -- he was always big, but he became, yeah. so it, but not in the last year of his life. his biceps were said to be 18 inches around. and then when he was an old man, he was just gaunt. >> before we get to the suicide, so we're pretty hard about ernest giving you an insight that, frankly, i did not know.

he also was, would you say, a genius? he changed the way we write in america. so elegantly simple, in your words. >> absolutely. you know, right. i think he probably is the greatest american prose writer. and, you know, he's -- no, i think he was absolutely a genius. he didn't, he wasn't consistent. i think that some of the things that were wrong with him caught up with him toward the end, after world war ii. but in his last year he wrote or put together a movable feast, which some of you have probably read. it's a memoir about paris. and if you know anyone going to paris, give it to them. that he put together as a charming book. beautifully written in the last year of his life. but he, he he lost the faith in his ability to keep writing. >> that's a key. and so sad, because after -- with all his problems, he he

lost confidence, didn't he? >> he really did. he really did. it was very sad. one of the -- he has a story, the snows of kilimanjaro, about -- it's so autobiographical about a writer who has so much to write about, he said. it was his duty to, you know, he had seep all these things -- had seep all these things, he needed to write about them and he didn't. that's one of the real tragedies. imagine if he had kept on writing. or kept on living, rather, and what he would have made of, say, vietnam or the new journal itch, you know? -- journalism, you know? it's just, it's really sad. >> without all his problems -- >> yeah. >> -- kept on writing. >> yeah. and i don't know, i'm not sure he could have been helped. >> bullfighting. [laughter]

[inaudible] sorry i'm not pronouncing it correctly. >> oh or yeah. >> he was genuinely friends and enamored with the matador. >> absolutely. he loved the bullfight. he loved fame. and, you know, he reported on the spanish civil war. he was always -- and he was heart broken that he couldn't live in franco's cuba. i mean, spain. but, yeah, i think he said it's the closest you can come to war without your being end dangered. finish engagerred. -- endangered. it's like going to war. and, you know, he thought, he was fascinated by death, and death is a big part of the bullfight. i'm not an to officionado. he was direct canned by gertrude stein of all people who said you've got to see it, it's made for you. >> yeah. she, obviously, was a big

influence on his writing. >> she was. and she had a lot in common, strangely enough, with his mother. he was the same build, massive -- she was the same build, massive and lesbian. and the same kind of charisma that they all, that hemingway and his mother shared. they were said to be those people who sucked the air. people said that about each one. they suck the air out of the room when they enter it. they're just really commanding people. >> handsome, pretty, amazing. what was his problem with women? [laughter] >> i think it's kind of a red herring. i think, you know, he wasn't very good to his wives, that's for sure. but i don't think he had animosity toward women with. i think somebody who understood humanity that well, it's impossible for them -- for him

to -- >> yeah. >> but he has, and the one short story that you might have read in school, it's a guy and his girlfriend, and he's talking to her about having an abortion. and it's incredibly sensitive to her, to him, to the issue. it's not easy, you know? you know, i think -- he wasn't that into creating great women characters, but i think it's a red herring. >> you talk about sensitivity and then he would explode at times in one of his moods. just one thing jumped out at me that patrick, he was pretty hard on patrick. patrick was very ill, and he slept outside his room. >> well, patrick had a traumatic brain injury. he had a concussion. and it took a horrible form. this is his little son. and he's 18, and he went crazy. and they, hemingway and the

servants and some, hemingway's friends had to hold him down. ernest wouldn't put him in an institution because he was so violet that he thought -- violent that he thought the attendants would hit him. so they -- and hemingway slept on a palette outside his room. lasted about six weeks. strangely enough, this is traumatic brain injury for you. he was, he had some shock treatments, and he was absolutely cured. never came back. so, but hemingway, yes, he was a heroic -- he was heroic, you know? when he was called to be when he stepped in. >> toward the end he's living in idaho, kind of moves to catch 'em, and i was moved by the psychotropic drugs. he was being treated. he had electric shock --

>> yes, many. >> they went to mayo x it was pretty intense. but he knew it, everybody knew it within his circle. and that was pretty fast slide, wasn't it? >> yeah. and nobody -- i think this happens a lot with mentally ill people who aren't in -- everybody thought minute else was taking care of it or hoped that somebody else. and he was taking competing drugs. he was on something that was the equivalent of author zien, which is really hard core. it was heavy duty, but they didn't, there were all kinds of other -- not all kinds, it's not like today, but there were a few other antidepressants that they never tried on him. and they believed him when he said i'm better, i want to get out. and he went home from the mayo clinic. that's when he tried to walk into the propel or hour. but they sent him back.

and the shock treatments do make you lose short-term memory, so he became convinced he'd never be able to write once he thought he'd lost his memory. >> that's to certainly a downer. what was the biggest surprise in your vast research about ernest? >> you know, there were subsidiary surprises. i came to the like one of his wives, pauline. some of you might have read the paris life, the novel by paul mcclain. it's about hadley hemingway which was, that's definitely his most romantic marriage x. it's commonly thought that pauline came in because she had a lot of money and stole him away. but it's not -- that wasn't the case. and, in fact, ernest took no responsibility for that at all, you know? in fact, hadley finally brought it up. she said i know you're having an

affair with pauline, and he exploded. he said if you hadn't brought that up -- [laughter] we'd be future. we could just continue -- we'd be fine. we'd continue. so it became hadley's fault. anyway, pauline was a wonderful person. the poet, elizabeth bishop, said she was the funniest person she ever met. there's a story, can i tell a short story about pauline? >> please. >> ernest eventually divorced her for wife number three, and ernest and pauline had two sons together, patrick and gregory. and it was time for a handoff of the children, you know? so pauline wrote him a letter detailing how this was going to happen, and then she tore it up into little pieces and put it in the envelope and sent it. so if he wanted to know how to get the kids, he was going to have to -- [laughter] >> now, that's creative. did he ever put it together? >> i have no -- he would have to, wouldn't he? >> sure. [laughter]

now, cuba is one of the suggests of a recent television, not a documentary, but, you know, entertainment. and it was up and down. it was explosive and sweet. but it began to give us, again, another picture of ernest hemingway. >> yeah. you know, we were getting so dark here finish. >> yeah, i know. everybody had that different view of ernest hemingway, i hope you didn't come expecting -- >> well, remember, he wrote a movable feast in his last year. but cuba was both, you know, it was -- he lived on a hilltop estate outside of havana. it was a beautiful place, you know, all tropical flowers and a swimming pool. he wasn't hugely wealthy, but it was -- and he wrote well there. but he was really isolated. you know, i -- he lived always far from the centers of civilization. he never lived in new york.

he never lived in -- he didn't stay long in chicago. he lived in key west which, i mean, it's way down there. people go there. and then cuba, he didn't like being around other writers, i know that. and he loved the spanish language, and he felt comfortable in cuba. you know, the gulfstream was right there, so he could fish all the time. it was good and bad, but i think that isolation did him more harm than good. and, you know, he needed, he needed people to tell him, to tell when his writer wasn't going well or this was a bad direction. and, unfortunately, his editor scriveners, the legendary max perkins, he died. and ernest really did not -- he'd published a book that i'm

sure max perkins would not have let him publish. he needed outside voices, and he isolated himself there. >> and he took perkins' death hard. >> he did. he did. he -- yeah. he didn't -- pauline, he said, was his best critic. and, of course, pauline he couldn't -- i think he lost the sort of guidance he needed to write. max perkins was different with all his writers, and nobody touched a word except his spelling and grammar. you could not edit him at all. so max perkins didn't to that. he did that with thomas wolfe. >> what would he do -- [laughter] >> he's a character. don't go in this direction. [laughter] hemingway was a terrible poet, and at one point he wanted scriveners to bring out a volume of his poetry. and it was only with great difficulty that they, no, i don't think so. [laughter]

>> one of the things i did not know was he was, he actually wanted the nobel prize. and he would get up in the morning on the day of waiting for his name to be called. [laughter] and so he had a couple beat him, who was it, faulkner was one -- >> oh, yes. >> -- who got in. and he got mad at faulkner for making some crack about his writing. >> faulkner, apparently, said i completely understand. and ernest understood what he was saying. faulkner said he doesn't, he's not really -- he doesn't try anything new. and he meant if you read faulkner, faulkner's very experimental, consciousness of prose and things like that. hemingway definitely did not do that. he had other -- his strength, his genius was elsewhere. he took offense, and then he i saw what faulkner meant. but, yeah, i think that's a

dirty little secret that a lot of them are waiting on, you know, for their nobel prize except bob dylan. [laughter] >> he's the new standard. >> yeah. [laughter] >> we're going to open it up for questions here in a moment, but i told mary that i wanted to be self-indull gent, because i thought she would get to a wonderful end. i hope i can get through this. two minutes, i swear to god, and no more. mental illness coarsed through the hemingway family like one of the rivers ernest wrote about with such beautiful economy. its incessant, implacable force only in small eddies where illness cursed individuals like ed hemingway, ernest, greg and later some in the next generation, and reportedly in those after that. it took and continues to take the form of cycles of mania and

psychotic depression, alcoholism and other addictions and suicide. many believe that three of ed and grace's six children, half of them killed themselves. acted and studied art history. one of ernest's grandchild wrote a book that was nominated for a blitzer and a national book award. these -- a pulitzer and a

national book award. just as surely as mental illness and suicide. on a memorial to hemingway's memory is an inscription that reads: best of all he loved the fall. the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high, blue, windless skies. now he will be a part of them forever. now, ernest wrote these about another sun valley friend, but in his last two years he wrote again about the fall, this time in paris in the 1920s. another good time in another good place. you expected to be sad in the fall. part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. yet fall, during that period of

his life, with was beautiful for what would inevitably follow. you knew there would always be the spring as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. [applause] >> let me see how much time we have left. okay, we have a few minutes left. questions, anyone? yes, sir. >> it's unclear why hemingway left cuba -- >> [inaudible] >> other people say he was forced out by the u.s. government. do you have any insight or knowledge about that? >> yes. well, the government wanted him to leave before he did. i mean, they were saying it's not safe for you. but castro, i mean, his house -- [inaudible]

it was given to the cuban people. and he didn't, he was -- [inaudible] but there was no way he could live there. they had to leave, they went to idaho. and for years it was the property of the cuban people. they had -- it was very difficult for them to get out and get their things out. they had art, you know, and so forth. after kennedy administration stepped in to help them, that's why mow the hemingway archives is at the jfk museum. there was a connection there. he wanted to stay but it was impossible. >> i'm going to -- [inaudible] castro loved hemingway. they would direct people to the hemingway house, which is a tourist attraction. so i'm sure he wanted to stay. yes, sir. >> you -- [inaudible]

did you come across anything, and frank lloyd wright's kid probably went to -- did you come across any of these connections? >> and we have the question repeated for the home audience? if anyone else has any questions, please line up here to stage right. >> frank lloyd wright and ernest hemingway kind of grew up -- [inaudible] and their kids played together. mary, what did you find out? >> there, again -- [inaudible] didn't say anything about him. but what -- [inaudible] the house they lived in was -- they had it built. and it was a very strange thing

that they were taught -- [inaudible] i wasn't surprised that i didn't learn a lot -- [inaudible] >> you know, a movable feast is the favorite of people because the notion of having these creative people at their parties and all of them clustering around gertrude stein is just great at this wonderful period -- >> yeah. paris in the '20s. of. >> in the fall. just think of it. >> [inaudible] >> how could you be feeling bad? >> well, he was at the top of his form. and you cannot -- he was so

handsome. [inaudible] he was so talented, and he was so, he had such magnetic appeal. and he did these mean things often, but he still had this appeal. >> be was highway joker, practical joker? >> could be. you know, he could be. i'm not sure he had much of a sense of humor about himself though, and that's, that can be fatal in a writer. sometimes he did -- >> but you make the point that he laced some of his, maybe all of his writings with a kind of sense of humor, with some offhand humor. >> yes, he did. his, he wrote a nonfiction book about -- i guess you'd call it a memoir now -- about his african safari called, sorry -- it's a -- anyway, his wife calls him

a miserable old man, m.o.m., and the between hills of africa. -- the green hills of africa. he's very funny about himself and even about his, he's not doing so well hundting, and the friend they brought along is doing better, and he's even okay about that which, you know, a different side of him. >> when you say hunting, he was a hunter. and he was actually killing too many trophy animals. and so kenya wildlife service or minute came in and said -- or somebody came in and said we're going to make you a game warden. >> yes. [laughter] >> and the other thing, you can't kill all these people, because you have got to protect them now. and he said, well, i can kill high year thats. >> yeah, jackals.

>> if you go to kilimanjaro, you have the hemingway camp. i don't know if it's still there, but maybe he wrote the snow is there, but he certainly got the ideas. >> yes, he did. and i loved reading about that camp. you know, they'd have a big lunch and a siesta and a lot of drinking, and then the cocktail hour. things like there was a structure that was a canvas -- [inaudible] obviously, they could move it. i think it was fascinating. they'd eat at a table under tempts. it was a way of -- under tents. it was a way of life. you know, when he went on the safari, the one where he was injured, he was much more interested in watching. he and mary wanted to watch the game more than -- and especially the birds. than he wanted to shoot them. that's when he was a game warden. [laughter] >> that still exists today. >> wow. >> you have the pay for it, but you can recreate the whole thing. a couple more questions.

yes. >> yes. you wrote a biography of mailor, and now you've written one of hemingway. could you compare their personalities and their style of writing? >> yeah. i wrote one about -- i seem to have a trilogy going. i wrote one about miller too. talk about a red herring. but mailor had huge respect for hemingway. of there's a quote that, he said something that i think is interesting about hemingway's legend. he said imagine how silly -- and he used the word "silly" -- a farewell to arms and for whom the bell tolls would be if the writer was 5-4, had a shrill voice -- [laughter] wore glasses, you know? and i guess, i get the point. you know? but i'm not sure how useful --

it actually is pointing out something that's very real. >> didn't you say that castro said he didn't -- all he needed to know about a revolution he learned from a farewell to arms? >> did he really? >> guerrilla fighting. >> thank you. you were talking about oak park, and i was reminded of saw lee nance, california, and the people not appreciating john steinbeck very much when he was alive. went to his museum many years ago, and it was just a small house. now 50 years after his death, huge museum. what sense do you get of citizens of oak park and their relationship with hemingway, and do you feel he gets enough recognition and honor from his town? >> well, i don't think they had much, and many people didn't even know he was there. and then they made a museum out

of his house. and even now, although it's a good museum, it's not the kind of level of the museum of national history. >> right. >> once in a while you can find someone citing a teacher of hemingway -- >> yes. >> and perhaps, well -- [inaudible] >> right. and finish right. in high school teachers, but he's not properly -- there are some serious hemingway scholars, associated with the public library and so so forth. then there's a wonderful museum there, but it's kind of an amateur museum. i think they are getting some money to try -- there's now a hemingway, oak park writing fellowship. >> here's a tip. we now have an american writers' museum in chicago. and you might go down there. they ought to be really featuring hemingway. >> could you describe the

falling out between hemingway and -- [inaudible] >> that's a complicated issue. it was in the spanish civil war. bees -- he had his translator ws a good friend, and he disappeared. and he was probably killed by the soviets, by the good guys. that was happening. and he was obsessed with it. and hemingway was sort of like, you know, calm down. because it was embarrassing. hemingway sided with -- he was on the left, and the soviets were the movers and shakers. and ernest was, didn't want to talk about people who had been murdered. this is what you're talking about, right? they had a huge falling out and never spoke again. and dos pasos became right wing.

it was bad. he had been a very good friend. he was not competitive with ernest, which was the only way you could be a good friend. >> thank you very much for coming. it's ernest hemingway. [laughter] by mary dearborn. [applause] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv. or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, everybody. hi. [laughter] so welcome.