Happy Anniversary, Hemingway Suicide!

The Idaho Mountain Express looks back, fifty years on.

From the article...

Hemingway immediately met a band of friends in Sun Valley. The group included Sun Valley Resort's chief guide, Taylor Williams, resort photographer Lloyd Arnold, Arnold's wife, Tillie Arnold, and eventually, a young Picabo rancher named Bud Purdy.

In the fall of 1939, Hemingway stayed with his girlfriend, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, in Suite 206 of the Sun Valley Lodge, which he soon dubbed "Glamour House." Hemingway worked diligently on "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and soon became enamored with duck hunting at Silver Creek, near Picabo, and pheasant hunting at points south, near Shoshone, Dietrich and Gooding.

Purdy, who still lives and works in Picabo, said he got to know Papa in 1940. They became hunting buddies.

"He was a macho guy," Purdy said in an April interview. "But he liked the guides and the common people, not the money people."

Purdy said Papa liked Idaho in part because the landscape reminded him of one of his favorite places in the world—Spain.

The Guardian also has a piece in which there's some discussion that the FBI had a hand in his suicide.

From the article...

For five decades, literary journalists, psychologists and biographers have tried to unravel why Ernest Hemingway took his own life, shooting himself at his Idaho home while his wife Mary slept.

Some have blamed growing depression over the realisation that the best days of his writing career had come to an end. Others said he was suffering from a personality disorder.

Now, however, Hemingway's friend and collaborator over the last 13 years of his life has suggested another contributing factor, previously dismissed as a paranoid delusion of the Nobel prize-winning writer. It is that Hemingway was aware of his long surveillance by J Edgar Hoover's FBI, who were suspicious of his links with Cuba, and that this may have helped push him to the brink.

Writing in the New York Times on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, AE Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World, said he believed that the FBI's surveillance "substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide", adding that he had "regretfully misjudged" his friend's fear of the organisation.