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On July 25, 1960, Hemingway and Mary left Cuba, never to return. During the summer of 1960, he set up a small office in his New York City apartment and attempted to work. He left New York City for good soon after. He then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover for the Life magazine piece. A few days later, he was reported in the news to be seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa." However, he was seriously ill and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. He was lonely and took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having had the first installments of The Dangerous Summer published in Life in September 1960 to good reviews. In October, he left Spain for New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment on the pretext that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where George Saviers (a Sun Valley physician) met them at the train.
At this time, Hemingway was constantly worried about money and his safety.He worried about his taxes and that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts he had left there in a bank vault. He became paranoid, thinking the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum.The FBI had, in fact, opened a file on him during World War II, when he used the Pilar to patrol the waters off Cuba, and J. Edgar Hoover had an agent in Havana watch Hemingway during the 1950s. By the end of November, Mary was at her wits' end, and Saviers suggested Hemingway go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and Hemingway may have believed he was to be treated there for hypertension. The FBI knew Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961. In an attempt to maintain anonymity, Hemingway was checked in at the Mayo Clinic under Saviers's name. Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo" but confirms he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960 and was "released in ruins" in January 1961. Reynolds was able to access Hemingway's records at the Mayo, which indicated that the combination of medications given to Hemingway may have created the depressive state for which he was treated.[151]
Three months after Hemingway was released from the Mayo Clinic, when he was back in Ketchum in April 1961, Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun" in the kitchen one morning. She called Saviers, who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley Hospital; from there he was returned to the Mayo Clinic for more electroshock treatments. He was released in late June and arrived home in Ketchum on June 30. Two days later, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, Hemingway "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun. He had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer of their Ketchum home, and according to Mellow, shot himself with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend".
Mary called the Sun Valley Hospital, and a doctor quickly arrived at the house who determined Hemingway "had died of a self-inflicted wound to the head". Mary was sedated and taken to the hospital, returning home the next day where she cleaned the house, and saw to the funeral arrangements and travel arrangements. Bernice Kert writes that at that time it "did not seem to her a conscious lie when she told the press Ernest's death had been 'accidental'." In a press interview five years later, Mary Hemingway confirmed that her husband had shot himself.
Hemingway Memorial, Sun Valley
Family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed Hemingway's death accidental. Of the funeral (during which an altar boy fainted at the head of the casket), Hemingway's brother Leicester wrote: "It seemed to me Ernest would have approved of it all." He is buried in the Ketchum cemetery.
Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father's before he killed himself; his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, due to which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirm that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves. In addition to being affected by his physical ailments, Hemingway's health was compromised by his having been a heavy drinker for most of his life.
In 1966, a memorial to Ernest Hemingway was placed just north of Sun Valley, above Trail Creek. At its base is inscribed a eulogy Hemingway wrote for a friend several decades earlier:
Best of all he loved the fall
the leaves yellow on cottonwoods
leaves floating on trout streams
and above the hills
the high blue windless skies
...Now he will be a part of them forever.
Influence and legacy
Life-sized statue of Hemingway by José Villa Soberón, at El Floridita bar in Havana
Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers who came after him emulated it or avoided it. After his reputation was established with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, he became the spokesperson for the post–World War I generation, having established a style to follow. His books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as being a monument of modern decadence", and disavowed by his parents as "filth". Reynolds asserts the legacy is that "[Hemingway] left stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become part of our cultural heritage."
Benson believes the details of Hemingway's life have become a "prime vehicle for exploitation", resulting in a Hemingway industry.[198] Hemingway scholar Hallengren believes the "hard boiled style" and the machismo must be separated from the author himself. Benson agrees, describing him as introverted and private as J. D. Salinger, although Hemingway masked his nature with braggadocio. During World War II, Salinger met and corresponded with Hemingway, whom he acknowledged as an influence. In a letter to Hemingway, Salinger claimed their talks "had given him his only hopeful minutes of the entire war" and jokingly "named himself national chairman of the Hemingway Fan Clubs."
The extent of Hemingway's influence is seen in the tributes and echoes of his fiction in popular culture. A minor planet, discovered in 1978 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh, was named for him (3656 Hemingway); Ray Bradbury wrote The Kilimanjaro Device, with Hemingway transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, about the friendship of two retired men, Irish and Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and Piper Laurie.The influence is evident with the many restaurants named "Hemingway"; and the proliferation of bars called "Harry's" (a nod to the bar in Across the River and Into the Trees).A line of Hemingway furniture, promoted by Hemingway's son Jack (Bumby), has pieces such as the "Kilimanjaro" bedside table, and a "Catherine" slip-covered sofa. Montblanc offers a Hemingway fountain pen, and a line of Hemingway safari clothes has been created.The International Imitation Hemingway Competition was created in 1977 to publicly acknowledge his influence and the comically misplaced efforts of lesser authors to imitate his style. Entrants are encouraged to submit one "really good page of really bad Hemingway" and winners are flown to Italy to Harry's Bar.
In 1965, Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. In 1980, a group of Hemingway scholars gathered to assess the donated papers, subsequently forming the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship."
Almost exactly 35 years after Hemingway's death, on July 1, 1996, his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died in Santa Monica, California. Margaux was a supermodel and actress, co-starring with her younger sister Mariel in the 1976 movie Lipstick. Her death was later ruled a suicide, making her "the fifth person in four generations of her family to commit suicide."
Three houses associated with Hemingway are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places: the Ernest Hemingway Cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, designated in 1968; the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West, designated in 1968; and the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House in Ketchum, designated in 2015. His boyhood home, in Oak Park, Illinois, is a museum and archive dedicated to Hemingway. In 2012, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
