Mary Welsh Hemingway — How It Was: A Life
“ Without delay we set off in a comfortable car with chauffer to drive in fog and rain over twisty mountain roads to Salzburg where, on a restaurant door, we saw the first sign — JEWS NOT SERVED HERE…”
I’ve written about Mary Welsh Hemingway quite a bit, but invariably as the fourth wife of Ernest Hemingway, which is inevitable of course, but it’s not the full story, as Mary Welsh was a fine journalist long before she ever set eyes on Hemingway.
Mary was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to Ernest Hemingway, no doubt prolonging his life at a time, back in Cuba after the war, when his health was in decline. Without Mary at his side The Old Man and the Sea could not have been completed, or, after his death when she was determined (and not through personal gain) to ensure the publication of Islands in the Stream, and A Moveable Feast, which was hugely generous considering she was quite literally left to clean up the dreadful mess Hemingway left after his suicide.
At the very start of her lovely, and beautifully written, 1976 autobiography, How It Was, Mary returns to her roots in northern Minnesota, and her beloved father:
