Hemingway and Gellhorn: The Untold Story of Two Writers, Espionage, War, and the Great Depression

This is a self-published exploitation biography written to cash in on the free publicity from the HBO "Hemingway and Gellhorn" film of 2012. Jerome Tuccille certainly did his research by assembling the fragments of the story from the sources listed in the 4 pages of material that he lists in the bibliography. But Tuccille is of the "print the legend" school and the wilder and more outrageous stories, whether true or not, take precedence, usually with each chapter ending in a string of exclamation marks. The story is only "untold" in the sense that no one else has packaged it in quite this way. All of the Hemingway biographies discuss 3rd wife Martha Gellhorn to some degree, since she was a major inspiration for his epic novel of the show more Spanish Civil War "For Whom the Bell Tolls".

So, this is somewhat trashy, but it is an entertaining read and it will likely make you want to read some more Ernest Hemingway and perhaps discover Martha Gellhorn's works as well, or perhaps one of the serious biographies such as Michael S. Reynolds' Hemingway: The 1930s through the Final Years or Caroline Moorehead's Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life. So that still earns Tuccille's book a plus vote in my view. Just be sure to take some of the stories with a pinch of salt.

p.s. Tuccille has also written an earlier Hemingway biographical fiction called A Portrait of Hemingway as a Young Man: Romping Through Paris in the 1920s. show less

If you enjoyed The Paris Wife, you will probably enjoy this memoir of Hemingway's third marriage to Martha Gellhorn, who was quite a lady! A good gossipy read.