Hemingway's Student
The Devotions of Arnold Samuelson, Assistant and Acolyte
Published on 21. July 2015
24 pages
978-1-101-97141-3 (ISBN)
Description
From the award-winning biography of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway's Boat: the poignant story of Arnold Samuelson, who looked to the great author for mentorship in writing and life. He was a Midwesterner, a young journalist, haunted by inner demons, with a rambling gene, who headed down to Key West and was keen to establish his place in the pantheon of American writers. This was not Papa but Arnold Samuelson, a tormented and scarred young man who pocketed a newspaper photograph of his hero and role model and set off to find him in May of 1934. As luck would have it, Hemingway was home: he was in need of assistance on his new boat, Pilar, and happy to dole out writing advice between fishing and beers. This is the story of Hemingway the teacher, a rare glimpse of Hemingway sharing his craft--part education of a writer and part shadow story of a man who wanted to be Hemingway, and what that meant for him.
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Person
Paul Hendrickson is the author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award. His previous book, Sons of Mississippi, won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. Among his other books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (1992 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996 finalist for the National Book Award). He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the father of two grown sons and lives with his wife, Cecilia, outside Philadelphia.
