The Many Boasts of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was, without a doubt, one of the most important and influential authors of the 20th century, but he was also a very boastful man. Although many are unconfirmed or simply unverifiable, here are some of the many boasts Hemingway made throughout his storied life.

He befriended a bear. In a 1950 interview published in The New Yorker, Hemingway told staff writer Lillian Ross of a somewhat special relationship he had with a bear. Ross writes: "In Montana, once, he lived with a bear, and the bear slept with him, got drunk with him, and was a close friend."

F. Scott Fitzgerald once asked Hemingway for help of an intimate nature. The Great Gatsby author was concerned about the size of… a part of his anatomy. Hemingway asked the author to follow him to the men’s room and upon inspection said (from A Moveable Feast): "'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are OK. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'"

He would finish the bar fights that James Joyce started. From Kenneth Schuyler Lynn’s book entitled Hemingway: "We would go out for a drink," Hemingway told a reporter for Time magazine in the midfifties, "and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!'"

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