Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage

If behind every great man there is a great woman, even the ultra-original Hemingway had several—including four wives. The one perhaps least known, wife #2, with the flapper’s body and uncomfortably short hair, is Pauline Pfeiffer. This up-close-and-personal biography (with its awkward title) comes in a line of other biographies, by women, about the women who had unflagging and largely unacknowledged influence on their author-husbands. Research and writing took more than a decade, including reading through unpublished work, no easy task given document-devouring conflagrations and the general reticence of the wealthy Pfeiffer family. The central insights are two: there was the unflagging material support of Pauline’s family during the lean years, especially from an uncle who, in his boundless admiration for his nephew-by-marriage, purchased the famous Key West home; and there was Pauline’s selfless, largely unknown editorial guidance, particularly on The Sun Also Rises. “The other woman” in Hemingway’s first marriage, Pauline suffered the identical indignity a little more than a decade later, when Hemingway had moved on, no longer in need of Pfeiffer money. Though overlong, this is a significant contribution to setting the record straight. Photos. (June)