Christine Whitehead
Hemingway was a literary giant famous for tough books with hard truths, a macho persona, and a fecklessness with women, be they wives or lovers. What if the most manly man in America has a daughter—in reality, Hemingway had three sons—who confronts him about his treatment of the women in his life and impacts some of his .... more
Hemingway was a literary giant famous for tough books with hard truths, a macho persona, and a fecklessness with women, be they wives or lovers. What if the most manly man in America has a daughter—in reality, Hemingway had three sons—who confronts him about his treatment of the women in his life and impacts some of his masterpieces? And what if this daughter has a passion to be the next Clarence Darrow in an era when Harvard blared a headline “Women Unwanted” preferring a man from the bottom of the academic pile to a woman at the top.
In this reimagining, Hemingway has the daughter he's always wanted, but she's not thrilled with her lot in life. Zelda Fitzgerald has assured her she's not pretty; her father is 100% reliable-60% of the time; and she learns early that for the Hemingways, love always ends, and usually badly. To add to her misery, she's hell-bent on becoming a topnotch litigator, only to learn that women in 1950 are barely welcome to practice law, much less litigate.
From the isolated world of her all-girls prep school to the lush Cuban home where her father writes, from the wide-open vistas of Idaho to the offices of one of Manhattan's most prestigious law firms, Hemingway's Daughter is a tale of yearning, of fathers and daughters, of first love and last love, of Hemingway as he might have been with a daughter to soften the edges.
This is her story.