Mary Welsh Hemingway

Mary Welsh Hemingway ( Welsh; April 5, 1908 – November 26, 1986) was an American journalist and author who was the fourth wife and widow of Ernest Hemingway.

Early life

Born in Walker, Minnesota, Welsh was a daughter of a lumberman. In 1938, she married Lawrence Miller Cook, a drama student from Ohio. Their life together was short and they soon separated. After the separation, Mary moved to Chicago and began working at the Chicago Daily News, where she met Will Lang Jr. The two formed a friendship and worked together on several assignments. A career move presented itself during a vacation in London when Mary started a new job at the London Daily Express. The position soon brought her assignments in Paris during the years preceding World War II.

Welsh in 1943 with other female war correspondents who covered the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II; from left to right: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long

Marriage to Ernest Hemingway

In 1944, Welsh met American author Ernest Hemingway while covering the war in London, and they became intimate. In 1945, she divorced Noel Monks, and in March 1946, she married Hemingway in a ceremony in Cuba.

After their wedding, Mary lived with Hemingway in Cuba for many years and, after 1959, in Ketchum, Idaho.

It was after they had moved to Ketchum, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, that Mary was awakened by a loud noise, and discovered that her husband had "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun. According to biographer James Mellow, Hemingway had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer of their Ketchum home, and with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend", had shot himself. Mary and other family members and friends initially told the press that the death had been "accidental",

Later life Following Hemingway's suicide in 1961, Mary acted as his literary executor, and was responsible for the publication of A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and other posthumous works. She gave the manuscript of A Moveable Feast to Tatiana Kudriavtseva, a translator from the Soviet Union, who was able then to publish a Russian translation simultaneous with the original's publication in English.

In 1976, she wrote her autobiography, How It Was. Further biographical details of Mary Welsh Hemingway can be found in the numerous Hemingway biographies, and in Bernice Kert's The Hemingway Women.

In her later years, Mary moved to New York City, where she lived in an apartment on 65th Street. After a prolonged illness, she died in St. Luke's Hospital at age 78, on November 26, 1986. In her will, she had stipulated that she be buried in Ketchum next to Hemingway, where they are now interred together.