Patrick Hemingway, the second son of Ernest Hemingway "who became a safari guide and big-game hunter in Africa, completed a book his father had started and published a volume of their letters," died September 2, the New York Times reported. He was 97. Of the legendary author's three children, Patrick Hemingway "came closest to simulating, though hardly emulating, his father."
He traveled often with his parents (Pauline Pfeiffer Patrick, his mother, was Ernest Hemingway's second wife) and was drawn to Africa by his father's 1935 nonfiction book, Green Hills of Africa. At 23, he moved to the continent and worked on commercial safaris for two years before founding his own company in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), taking patrons through Serengeti National Park and Kilimanjaro National Park.
In the early 1950s, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, went on a 10-week trip to East Africa, where Patrick Hemingway joined them on a safari. His father told him about a blend of fiction and memoir he was planning, the Times noted. "He soon began the book, True at First Light, but never finished the project.... Patrick, however, completed it. His father had written 200,000 words before abandoning the manuscript. Patrick cut it in half and finished the text with what he understood to be his father's intended story, having discussed it with him during the expedition."
With an introduction by Patrick Hemingway, the book was published in 1999. He also wrote a foreword to the 2016 edition of Green Hills of Africa; a foreword to a 2009 edition of his father's Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, recast by Patrick's nephew Seán Hemingway, a son of Gloria Hemingway; and a foreword to a 2012 edition of A Farewell to Arms, including 47 alternate endings that Ernest Hemingway had suggested. In 2022, he published Dear Papa, a collection of 120 letters that he and his father had exchanged over 30 years.
Patrick Hemingway gave up his safari business in the early 1960s after his wife became ill. The Times noted that, for more than a decade, he taught wildlife conservation at the College of African Wildlife Management in Tanzania. He was also a forestry officer for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
He oversaw the intellectual property of his father's estate, telling the Times in 2023: "I was the only person who seemed to be interested, and I was uniquely qualified." In an interview with KBZK, he observed: "Most of the things that he liked, I liked, too, and this was especially true of reading and literature. We were on the same wavelength."
He also said he had never felt diminished living in the shadow of his father: "I enjoyed being his son. It didn't bother me because I don't think that I was terribly ambitious. I never was. I didn't want to win a Nobel Prize."