The Hemingway son who tended to his father’s legacy

His father’s outsized reputation, Patrick said, “didn’t bother me because I don’t think that I was terribly ambitious.”

(Image credit: Paul Marotta / Getty Images)

Patrick Hemingway was comfortable in the shadow of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway. Though the elder Hemingway was famously troubled and mercurial, their affection was deep and mutual. “I would rather fish with you and shoot with you than anybody that I have ever known since I was a boy,” Ernest wrote in a letter to his son. Patrick completed Ernest’s unfinished novel True at First Light and published Dear Papa, a collection of 120 letters the two exchanged over a period of 30 years. His father’s outsized reputation, Patrick said, “didn’t bother me because I don’t think that I was terribly ambitious.”

Patrick Miller Hemingway was born in Kansas City, Mo., to Ernest and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, during a stopover in the family’s many travels. The middle child of three boys, Patrick mostly spent his childhood “in Key West with summers in Wyoming and Idaho while his private school education was punctuated by regular hunting and fishing trips,” said The Times (U.K.). Inspired by his father’s 1935 novel The Green Hills of Africa, Patrick moved to Tanzania in 1951, funding the move by selling the Arkansas plantation he inherited on his mother’s death. He became a safari guide, hunter, and forestry officer for the United Nations, returning to the U.S. in 1975.

Hemingway “managed a long life in a family haunted by suicide and mental illness,” said the Associated Press. Patrick’s brother Gregory, who transitioned and adopted the name Gloria, struggled with alcohol abuse and died in a Miami jail cell in 2001. Ernest famously suffered from depression and alcoholism and shot himself in 1961. “Under proper treatment, he would have had a nice old age,” Patrick said, before adding sardonically, “there’s no such thing as a nice old age.”