Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner is a 304-page hardcover first 1955, and this copy was published in 1966 by Random House New York.  It was a Book of the Month Club selection.  The dust jacket has numerous chips and closed tears along the edges but is fully intact.  The book has light tanning to the pages but is in good condition.

Book Summary

It is rare in literary history that a great writer has a friend who can remain that and yet be an observer--a friend who can portray vividly, with warmth and objectivity, the man's life, his greatness, his death.  For the last fourteen years of Ernest Hemingway's life A.E. Hotchner was such a friend; together the two of them went deep-sea fishing off Cuba; traveled from New York to Paris to Spain, where they toured the bullfight circuit; hunted in Ketchum, Idaho; ran with the bulls in Pamplona--and once ever masqueraded as a matador and his manager in an actual bullfight.

When he first met Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner was on a magazine assignment, and he began to take notes on the events of each day--a practice he continued for the duration of their friendship.  These notes of their conversations provide the authority and material of this memoir.  The chronology of Papa Hemingway if the fourteen years before Hemingway's death, but much of the narrative flashes back to Hemingway's reminiscences of his childhood, to the Paris literary group in the Twenties, to his early years as a writer, and to the people and circumstances that were the reality behind his fiction.  The past is interwoven with the present, and from this emerges an extraordinary picture of Hemingway and his relationships with other writers, his friends and his wives.

The author's affection for Hemingway is clear; and his very moving account of the forces that eventually overcame the writer and drove him to self-destruction is told with a compassion that reveals Ernest Hemingway's death as tragic.  Papa Hemingway is an important and unusually vivid memoir of one of the great writers of our time.