Globe Pequot / Lyons Press
Pages: 272
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4930-1822-2 • eBook • November 2016 • $18.00 • (£13.99)
Tony Castro is a historian, Hemingway scholar, journalist, and author of multiple books including the best-selling Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son, hailed by The New York Times as the definitive biography about the baseball Hall of Fame legend. A former national correspondent for The Washington Post, Castro has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Texas Observer, and Sports Illustrated. He was given a special tour of La Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, arranged for him by Fidel Castro in 1967, was among the first to view the collection of Hemingway papers opened to researchers by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and has long known screenwriter Teo Davis, the son of Bill and Anne Davis, the American expatriates who hosted Hemingway’s last visits to Spain. He lives in Los Angeles.
I had no idea there was so much still to be written about Hemingway. Tony Castro has found much gold left behind by the authors and scholars who came before him. At the start of a single chapter, I found anecdotes about Lauren Bacall, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood that I’d never heard before – and I am an avid collector of such anecdotes. Looking for Hemingway is a different way of looking at Hemingway and should shape all our attitudes about the man and his work from here on in.— Allen Barra, author of Mickey and Willie: The Parallel Lives of the Golden Age of Baseball
Ernest Hemingway was a great writer, a lousy husband, a braggart, and often treated his friends terribly. But as Tony Castro has written in Looking for Hemingway, the man fascinated the world from his birth to his death. Through Castro’s narrative, I got to meet Ava Gardner, Manolete, Picasso, Lauren Bacall, and Bill and Anne Davis, the couple that hosted EH for the last years of his life. Like one of Woody Allen’s movies, I was taken back to the era of the Lost Generation, and I loved every minute of it.— Peter Golenbock, author of American Prince (with Tony Curtis) and Presumed Guilty (with Jose Baez.)
Tony Castro's Looking for Hemingway is an intriguing glimpse into the life of the aging Ernest Hemingway in 1959, as he makes another trip to Spain and continues his decades-long fascination with bullfighting. In Castro’s lively yet poignant portrayal, Hemingway's glamorous 60th birthday party in his friends' beautiful villa contrasts with his efforts to recapture his youth. A worthwhile addition to the literature on Hemingway and his circle.— Deborah Kalb, journalist and co-author of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama