A New Ernest Hemingway Biography Like No Other

In 1975, while on my second trip to Europe with Virginia and with no idea when we’d return, I decided to keep a diary. This bound notebook was filled with notes on the places we visited. But I also drew the menacing Guardia Civil from our first trip to Spain, the faces of many people I wanted to remember, and fishing boats in Portugal. I discovered later, as photographers sometimes do with the things they photograph, that I did not forget anything I drew and that my drawings stayed with me longer than anything I wrote. Ernest

I began to sketch people and places I wanted to remember in my reporter notebooks. After the fall of communism, I traveled the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Beijing. At the time, Russian trains were full of thieves and I did not dare bring a computer. This was when I decided to reintroduce myself to the pleasure of longhand along with many drawings. Some with color. I had a lot of time. The real change came in 1991 when I traveled for three months by dugout canoe in the rainforest of French Guiana and Surinam. I wrote all my notes by hand and illustrated them with watercolors. I took one of those pocket-sized packs of color pans and used the water from the river to paint. Ernest

Since then there has been no going back. I record all my travels in small books. Sometimes I take the watercolor paper to a bindery, and they make books for me. I write very little in these books, but most days I paint one or two or more pictures and write where they are and the day I did the paintings. They are my diaries of all my travels. So far I have 28 color diaries, and I am excited to share some of these stories in my new book, The Importance of Not Being Ernest. A tribute to Ernest Hemingway, my new book explores the intersections between my life and Hemingway’s, resulting in a creative account of our ever-inspiring writing careers. My life has always felt to be intertwined with Ernest Hemingway’s legend. The Importance of Not Being Ernest starts in Idaho on the day of Hemingway’s death and follows along through Spain, Paris, New York, and more.  Ernest

Written by Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, Salt, and the new book, The Importance of Not Being Ernest