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Remembering the last – and perhaps favorite – of Ernest Hemingway’s sons – Cognoscenti

Patrick Hemingway, left, looks at his father, Ernest Hemingway, in Tanzania in 1940 (Nair, File / AP) Editor’s Note: Featured image at top created by WP AI.

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Remembering the last — and perhaps favorite — of Ernest Hemingway’s sons

By Tom Putnam, October 30, 2025, Cognoscenti contributor

Tom Putnam is the former director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the Concord Museum. More…

Few people can claim their birth informed the ending to one of the 20th century’s most iconic novels. But that was the case for Patrick Hemingway.

Patrick was born in 1928, just as his father, Ernest, was writing “A Farewell to Arms,” including the final scene in which the American lieutenant, Frederic Henry, loses his wife, an English WWI nurse named Catherine Barkley, and their baby in childbirth. As Hemingway wrote in the introduction to the 1948 re-issue of the novel:

During the time I was writing the first draft my second son Patrick was delivered in Kansas City by Caesarean section and while I was rewriting my father killed himself in Oak Park, Illinois. I was not quite 30 years old when I finished the book … I remember all of these things happening and the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I have ever been.

–Ernest Hemingway (Introduction to the 1948 re-issue of the novel)

I will be thinking of Patrick — who died on September 3 at age 97 — this weekend when the 49th Annual PEN/Hemingway Award Celebration takes place on Columbia Point. (Usually, the ceremony is held at the Kennedy Library, but this year it will be at UMass Boston due to the federal government shutdown).

For years, Patrick and his wife, Carol, traveled to Boston from their home in Montana for this ceremony so that Patrick could personally present these honors.

Patrick Hemingway, center, watches as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, right, talks to reporters at ceremonies marking the opening of the Ernest Hemingway Room at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston on July 18, 1980. (Stu Rosner / AP)

According to the literary historian Sandra Spanier, “[Ernest Hemingway] loved all three of his sons, but he really felt a special affinity and closeness with Patrick.”

In fact, one of Patrick’s last literary adventures was to publish “Dear Papa: The Letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway.”

In one of those letters, Ernest wrote: “You were the only brother I had among my sons.”

In his introduction, Patrick joked that the book was his attempt to answer the question he had often been asked by friends and strangers alike: “Did you know your father?”

There are many references to hunting and fishing in the letters and Patrick often recalled their happiest times together were in such sporting pursuits.

But he insisted that the letters’ true significance resides in the light they cast on the person he grew to know over time – someone quite different from the normal portrayal of Papa Hemingway: “The man I knew tried very hard to be a good family man…intimately connected with his wives and his children all his life.”

Professor Spanier, an expert on Hemingway letters, indicates that Ernest was clearly proud of Patrick’s intellect.

And looking back at their exchanges, Patrick noted, “as my maturity developed, I could use my letters to create something similar to his and in certain fields, such as poetry and hunting, I could openly compete.”

Many scholars believe Hemingway was paying tribute to Patrick in his novel, “Islands in the Stream”, with this description of the protagonist’s second son: “The middle boy had a lovely, small, animal quality, and he had a good mind and a life of his own. He was affectionate and had a good sense of justice and was good company.”

Patrick was the firstborn son of Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, but it was Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who (after an outreach from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) decided to donate the Hemingway materials to the Kennedy Library.

Unfortunately, she was unable to travel to Boston for the dedication of the Hemingway Room, just months after the JFK Library opened in 1979. So Patrick represented his family at the ceremony with Kennedy Onassis.

Since that time, no one has been more stalwart in supporting Hemingway’s literary legacy and the Library’s efforts to preserve this remarkable collection than Patrick. He always insisted that any Hemingway-related programming focus not only on his father’s oeuvre, but also promote literature writ large.

That might have been best accomplished at the Hemingway Centennial Conference, held in Boston in 1999, featuring scores of renowned authors including four Nobel Prize laureates: Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe, and Derek Walcott, who all spoke of their debt to Hemingway.

Patrick Hemingway with unidentified students and a game department official at the Wildlife Management College on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1969. (Nair / AP)

Another powerful example are the annual PEN/Hemingway Awards which have honored authors such as Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lhari, Edward P. Jones, and Yiyun Li for their debut novels and story collections.

As the former director of the Kennedy Library, I introduced Patrick at many of these events. Once, when I used the term “Hemingway’s sole surviving son” he responded with a twinkle in his eye, saying “that means I get to have the last word!”

And so, fittingly, let me allow him the penultimate word here.

In his preface to the library edition of “Green Hills of Africa,”Hemingway’s memoir of his 1933 safari across the Serengeti, Patrick noted that the book is divided into four parts, specifically four pursuits, of which the last is titled “pursuit as happiness.”

This pursuit was, in many ways, what informed Patrick’s decision at age 23, in the wake of his mother’s death and after graduating from Harvard, to follow his father’s footsteps to East Africa, where he would live, work and start his own family.

When Patrick was a child, his mother had distributed Hemingway’s African trophy mounts of lion, kudu and other antelope throughout their home in Key West.

“In the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, Gregory, it was a wildebeest,” he wrote, “making East Africa my promised land.”

“But then,” he continued, “who of us hasn’t a promised land, caught up with happiness, the constant nymph, and run with her swiftly through the green birch forest of Arden only to trip and fall and watch her disappear into the trees without a backward glance? So light a candle, love the light, and face the darkness when the candle fails.”

While not unexpected, Patrick’s final disappearance into death’s green birch forest has left our world a darker place. Yet, for me, it will be forever lit by warm memories of times shared with Hemingway’s middle son and of his good mind and good company.

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