The Paris Husband

“A masterful work and a cracking good read.”

—Valerie Hemingway, author of Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways

More than half a century after his death, American writer Ernest Hemingway continues to fascinate readers, as much for his flamboyant and multifaceted life as for his indelible novels. In The Paris Husband, author and Hemingway expert Scott Donaldson explores one of the key events in Hemingway’s life—his first marriage to Hadley Richardson—and his years in Paris in the early 1920s, when, as he wrestled with romantic and artistic challenges, he found himself as a writer.

The story begins in Chicago, where Hemingway, a young and struggling writer from Oak Park, meets Hadley Richardson, a quiet, steady, and deeply loyal woman from St. Louis. They marry and move to Paris, where they become part of the expatriate community that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. For a few years, they are happy. Hadley provides the stability Hemingway needs to write. Then Hemingway meets Pauline Pfeiffer. The marriage unravels. In a famous incident, Hadley loses a valise containing all of Hemingway’s unpublished manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon. Hemingway never fully forgives her. They divorce. He marries Pauline. The lost manuscripts become a wound that never heals.

This is Donaldson at his most insightful and compassionate: a biography that focuses not on the myth of Hemingway the hunter, the bullfighter, the brawler, but on the young, vulnerable writer who loved a woman, lost her, and spent the rest of his life trying to forget—or to write his way back.

• A focused, intimate portrait of Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson, from their meeting in Chicago to their divorce in Paris

• Traces the early years in Paris (1921–1926), when Hemingway transformed from an unknown journalist into the author of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises

• Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the man behind the myth, and the woman who helped make him—only to be left behind

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

• Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.

• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that every great writer has a ghost, and that Hemingway’s ghosts wore wedding rings.

About the Author

Scott Donaldson is a biographer and critic who has written and edited eighteen books on twentieth-century American authors, including five about Ernest Hemingway’s life and work. His latest book, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), recounts the frequent trials and rare triumphs of those who write life stories of great authors. Donaldson is known for his meticulous research, his clear prose, and his sympathy for his subjects without whitewashing their flaws. In The Paris Husband, he brings the same rigor and compassion to the story of Hemingway’s first marriage—a story Hemingway himself told only in fragments, and only after turning it into fiction. Donaldson lives in Virginia