Patrick Hemingway, the second son of the novelist 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 on Tuesday at his home in Bozeman, Mont. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by Bettina Klinger, a representative of the Hemingway family.
Of Hemingway’s three sons, Patrick came closest to simulating, though hardly emulating, his father, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and renown for novels and short stories drawn from his life as a World War I ambulance driver, a journalist in the Spanish Civil War and a man obsessed with bullfighting, deep-sea fishing and women who were as challenging as he was.
Hemingway’s first son, Jack, was an avid fly fisherman who fished in Europe between battles in World War II. He had difficulty finding a postwar career until he became Idaho’s fish and game commissioner in the 1970s. He died in 2000.
Hemingway’s third child, Gloria Hemingway, was a physician who struggled with alcohol abuse. She wrote a memoir, “Papa” (1976), before undergoing transition surgery later in life. She died in 2001.
Affectionately known within the family as Mouse, Patrick was born to Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy Roman Catholic American journalist who became Vogue’s correspondent in Paris. They married there in 1927 after a whirlwind romance and Hemingway’s conversion to Catholicism.
Patrick traveled often with his parents and was drawn to Africa by his father’s 1935 nonfiction book, “The Green Hills of Africa,” about a monthlong safari there with Pauline in 1933. It described the thrilling terrors of a charging rhino that Ernest shot dead in Tanganyika, now Tanzania.
Seeking adventure, Patrick, at 23, moved to the continent and worked on commercial safaris for two years. He then founded his own company in Tanganyika, taking patrons through Serengeti National Park, where elephants, lions, leopards, Cape buffaloes and rhinos roamed free, and to Kilimanjaro National Park, home to Africa’s highest peak.
In 1953 and early 1954, Ernest and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who were living in Cuba at the time, went on a 10-week trip to East Africa. Patrick joined them on a safari, and his father told him about a blend of fiction and memoir he was planning. The trip ended badly: Hemingway was seriously injured in two small-plane crashes on successive days. A severe head injury went undiagnosed until he returned home.
He soon began the book, “True at First Light.” The title came from a passage he wrote about a mirage: “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there, absolutely true, beautiful and believable.” He 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. He wrote an introduction and published the book in 1999.
He also wrote a foreword to the 2016 edition of “The 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’s; and a foreword to a 2012 edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” including 47 alternate endings that Hemingway had suggested. In 2022, Patrick published “Dear Papa,” a collection of 120 letters that he and his father had exchanged over some 30 years.
Hemingway left Cuba in 1960 and moved to the Sun Valley town of Ketchum, Idaho. There, on July 2, 1961, he killed himself with a shotgun blast. Interviewed in 2023 by the CBS television affiliate KBZK in Bozeman, Patrick said his father’s alcohol abuse had probably played a part in his depression and suicide.
“Under proper treatment, he would have had a nice old age,” he said, then added with a laugh, “Although there’s no such thing as a nice old age.”
Patrick Hemingway was born in Kansas City, Mo., on June 28, 1928, on a stopover during his parents’ travels. He grew up mostly in Key West, Fla., where his father kept his writing studio. As a boy, Patrick had tutors, attended private schools and spent summers in Wyoming and Idaho.
“I was taught to hunt by my father on our trips to Idaho, and I learned to fish in the Caribbean aboard his boat, the Pilar,” he recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2023. “I had a wonderfully privileged life, and I tried to make the most of it.”
In 1940, when Patrick was 12, his parents divorced, and his father married Martha Gellhorn, a novelist and journalist who met Hemingway while covering the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. They were divorced in 1945, and the next year Hemingway married Mary Welsh, also a former war correspondent and Patrick’s last stepmother.
Patrick graduated from Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in New Milford, Conn., in 1946, attended Stanford University for two years and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and literature. He married Henrietta Broyles that year.
After his mother died, in 1951, Mr. Hemingway and his wife moved to Africa and used his inheritance to buy a 2,300-acre farm in Tanganyika. They had a daughter, Edwina, known as Mina.
Mr. Hemingway founded his safari business in Tanganyika in 1955. He gave it up in the early 1960s after his wife became ill. 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.
His wife died in 1963. In 1975, he returned with his daughter to the United States and settled in Bozeman. He married Carol Thompson, a theater arts professor at the City College of New York, in 1982. She died in 2023. He is survived by his daughter, Edwina Hemingway; four grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Mr. Hemingway oversaw the intellectual property of his father’s estate. “I was the only person who seemed to be interested, and I was uniquely qualified,” he said in the 2023 Times interview.
One qualification, he said, was the rapport he had with his father, as evidenced by the letters they exchanged. “Most of the things that he liked, I liked, too,” he told KBZK in 2023, “and this was especially true of reading and literature.”
“We were on the same wavelength,” he added.
Mr. Hemingway said he never felt diminished living in the shadow of a famous father.
“I enjoyed being his son,” he said. “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.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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