Hemingway's Last Chapter: Ketchum, 1959 to 1961
Near Ketchum, Idaho
Ernest Hemingway first came to Ketchum in the fall of nineteen thirty-nine as a guest of the Union Pacific Railroad's publicity machine. Sun Valley Lodge had opened three years earlier, and the railroad needed famous faces to fill its sleeper cars. Hemingway came, liked the hunting, liked the mountains, and kept coming back. By nineteen fifty-nine he had bought a house above the Big Wood River on the edge of town, with a view of the hills he had been walking for twenty years.
By then he was sixty years old and something was coming apart. His blood pressure was dangerously high. His kidneys were struggling. He had begun to lose the ability to read, and for a writer who believed that the work was what kept him alive, the loss of his reading was a particular kind of terror. That winter his doctors sent him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. He received at least a dozen treatments, probably more. The ECT addressed some of what his doctors could measure. What it destroyed was his memory, which destroyed his ability to write, which destroyed the thing he had organized his entire life around. He knew what had happened to him and he said so explicitly to friends.
He returned to Ketchum in the spring of nineteen sixty-one. He tried to write. He could not get sentences to cohere the way they once had. He was afraid all the time, in ways that were new and could not be reasoned away.
On July second, nineteen sixty-one, he came downstairs before dawn at the Ketchum house, went to the vestibule where his guns were stored, and used a double-barreled shotgun. He was sixty-one years old.
His father Clarence had shot himself in nineteen twenty-eight. His sister Ursula took her own life in nineteen sixty-six. His brother Leicester in nineteen eighty-two. His granddaughter Margaux in nineteen ninety-six. The Ketchum house, still a private residence, is the geographic end point of the most devastating family story in American literary history.
