With Hemingway: A year in Key West and Cuba

I was given a beat up hardcover edition of this book that a friend had found on the street in Brooklyn. By the looks of it (moldy and wrinkled at the edges) and fact that I'd never heard of it I sort of figured it would be a poorly written book. I was entirely wrong. After three days I reread it and I still think that compared to some of the biographies I've read this little book does more to explain the man and his character better than any of them. Samuelson creates a world lost in time: Key West in the 1930's, before it became an overpopulated Mecca for drunken tourists. The reader is welcomed aboard the Pilar, not only as a spectator but also as a member of the crew, fishing the stream, drinking short sips of whiskey and occasionally discussing what makes good writing. Arnold Samuelson's conversations reveal the stoic and sometimes brutally honest characteristics of one of America's most beloved writers. If you want to understand Hemingway, how he thought, what he valued, and the way he carried himself then I would highly recommend this book.

My favorite account of Ernest Hemingway ... written by a fledgling writer, Arnold Samuelson, who signed on as a deckhand on Hemingway's private boat, Pilar, in Key West and Cuba, to learn the secrets of one of America's greatest outdoorsmen and writers, Ernest Hemingway ... tales of great fishing, and Hemingway shares some of his writing secrets to this young deck hand... I have given several copies of this book to friends, who continue to pass it on to other readers ... all seem to marvel at its descriptive writing style ... I keep a copy on my bookshelf ... a great read ...

The best quality of this book is the clean language worthy of Hemingway. Samuelson had an ear for exact quoting. His manuscript lay in a trunk until after his death, when his daughter found it, and decided to publish. Lucky us.

It is astonishing that this book is so little known. Here is a memoir which records Hemingway's insights on writing as given to his only pupil, a young writer/hobo who shows up one day at Hemingway's Key West house hoping for a few words of advice. "He left me with that damned marvelous feeling you can have only once in a lifetime if you are a young man who wants to become a writer and you have just met the man you admire as the greatest writer alive and you know instinctively that he is already your friend." Impulsively Hemingway hires the twenty-two-year-old "tramp" to guard his new boat, the Pilar. Samuelson carefully records Hemingway's thoughts on writing (including a "mandatory" reading list for the young, aspiring writer). Not only does the book illuminate Hemingway, his life, his fishing, his family and his work, but it also tells the story of a fascinating individual who spent a year with him.