Paul Hendrickson - Hemingways Student: The Devotions of Arnold Samuelson, Assistant and Acolyte

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A LSO BY

P AUL H ENDRICKSON

HEMINGWAYS BOAT

Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

From National Book Critics Circle Awardwinner Paul Hendrickson, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood. Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961from Hemingways pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicideHendrickson traces the writers exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingways sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writers boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosityto struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend. Hemingways Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer.

Biography

SONS OF MISSISSIPPI

A Story of Race and Its Legacy

They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in Life magazine or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club. More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlely that tracks the movement of racism across three generations and bears witness to its ravages among both black and white Americans.

Political Science

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the wars witnesses and McNamara himself. In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamaras story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the wars architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

History

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The Maestrothat was Arnold Morse Samuelsons Hemingway-bequeathed nickname, which got shortened soon enough to the Mice. During dead calms on Pilar, Hemingways new boat, the quiet evening drifts of that first (and largely disappointing) summer and fall of the fishing, when most of the marlin trophies had seemed to desert the Stream, or hang at the bottom, the Mice used to take out his battered violin and send Mozart and Beethoven out across the waves, not so well, but with great exuberance.

Arnold Samuelson was the twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer and self-styled Hemingway character who tore from a Minneapolis newspaper Hemingways photograph, stuck it in his rucksack, and rode his hitchhiking thumb and the top of boxcars straight into his heros life and right onto his new boat. For something like nine months, from late spring of 1934 to late winter of 1935, the Mice got to serve as the night watchman and deckhand and writing acolyte at the masters knee, making a dollar a day to boot.

For the bulk of the nearly five decades he lived on the earth after stepping off Hemingways boat, Samuelson, whod once so badly wished to make it as a serious fiction writer, lived a socially outcast existence on the edge of a little jackrabbit crossroads in Coke County, Texas, called Robert Lee. Found among his scattered possessions, upon his death, was a three-hundred-page typed nonfiction manuscript about his long-ago time with Hemingway. Most of it he had drafted on Pilar, under Hemingways guidance. But every now and then, through the decades, he would takeout the fly-specked pages of his memoir and look at them by lamplight, adding, subtracting, rewriting, shifting around sentences and paragraphs, wonderingas he once wrote in a scrambled note to himself that was discovered by his family after his deathif he could turn the work into literature. Thats only one of the sadder ironiesit was literature. He just could never see it.

I cant really say, even now, why, nearly from the start, I felt myself pulled toward this eclipsed and footnoted and shadowed life, although I suspect the pulling must have had something to do with a daughters brief and eloquent preface to her fathers posthumously published and largely ignored work (which came out as