Read This Now

t. Louis is 4,380 miles from Paris, 1,374 miles from Key West, and 1,166 miles from Havana, locales that shaped Ernest Hemingway and, reveals, none of those adventures would have been possible if not for St. Louisans. First is Katy Smith, whom Hemingway met while summering in Michigan. She introduced Hemingway to the woman who became his first wife: Hadley Richardson, also from St. Louis. Richardson’s trust fund paid for the couple’s life in Paris. Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was also a St. Louisan. But it was her generous Uncle Gus, who co-owned Pfeiffer Chemical Company here, who gave the couple a home in Key West, as well as Hemingway’s Gulf Stream fishing expeditions and an African safari. Then there was St. Louis native Martha Gellhorn, renowned war correspondent and Hemingway’s third wife. She would turn her husband on to the Cuban estate Finca Vigía. It was a trip to Cuba that planted the idea for the book in Theising’s mind. There, in Hemingway’s house, he began thinking about the writer’s connections to St. Louis. It’s thinking about those relationships that’s the greatest pleasure of reading . There was a time in which denizens of this city influenced one of the brightest writers of the 20th century, not just for one summer after a chance encounter on a Michigan lake but for years after, over and over. They not only bankrolled his career but also influenced his craft.