From the first North American scholar permitted to study at Cuba’s Finca Vigia Museum and Research Center, Hemingway’s former residence, comes a radically new understanding of Hemingway’s life in Cuba.
This is the Hemingway story that has never been told: the full story of Papa as an expatriate in Cuba, an ingenuous American opportunist whose natural openness and curiosity connected with the distinctive warmth of the Cuban character. In Cuba he formed key artistic relationships -- including a longstanding affair with a previously undiscovered Cuban lover, Leopoldina Roderiguez -- and became the Nobel Prize-winning literary legend we know today.
Andrew Feldman uses his unprecedented access to newly available archives to tell the full story of Hemingway’s Cubanness: his friendships with Cojimar fishermen, his adoptive Cuban family, the strong influences on his work by Cuban writers, his connections to Cuban political figures and celebrities.
In doing so, Feldman changes our understanding of our most influential literary figure. Far from being a post-success, pre-suicide exile, Hemingway’s decades in Cuba were the richest of his life, and came to define the man who would become a legend.
This is the Hemingway story that has never been told: the full story of Papa as an expatriate in Cuba, an ingenuous American opportunist whose natural openness and curiosity connected with the distinctive warmth of the Cuban character. In Cuba he formed key artistic relationships -- including a longstanding affair with a previously undiscovered Cuban lover, Leopoldina Roderiguez -- and became the Nobel Prize-winning literary legend we know today.
Andrew Feldman uses his unprecedented access to newly available archives to tell the full story of Hemingway’s Cubanness: his friendships with Cojimar fishermen, his adoptive Cuban family, the strong influences on his work by Cuban writers, his connections to Cuban political figures and celebrities.
In doing so, Feldman changes our understanding of our most influential literary figure. Far from being a post-success, pre-suicide exile, Hemingway’s decades in Cuba were the richest of his life, and came to define the man who would become a legend.