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Valerie Hemingway
Author of Running with the Bulls
Valerie Hemingway
Author of Running with the Bulls
Biography
A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, she devoted her life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during the tumultuous final months in Cuba.
Hemingway has evoked the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway’s last years in Running with the Bulls, published by Ballantine Books in 2006. The account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her astonishing years of living as a Hemingway, Running with the Bulls fully captures the mystique of one of our greatest authors.
As his secretary in Spain, France, and Cuba, after the author's death Hemingway worked for the Hemingway Estate in Cuba, Key West, Ketchum, and New York—gathering all of the author’s papers and organizing them for presentation to the Kennedy Library.
She came by the Hemingway name by marrying—and later divorcing—Gregory, his youngest son. For two decades she worked in publishing and public relations in New York City, including two years as a fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Her articles have appeared in Saturday Review, Ski Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is a contributing writer for Distinctly Montana, where her most recent piece from Spring 2012 features her interview with George Keremedjiev, founding director of the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, an extraordinary resource that is associated with the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.
A frequent lecturer on the international circuit, she has appeared in Canada, South America, several European countries, and Israel. She has conducted memoir writing workshops under the auspices of the American Association of University Women.
Hemingway was invited to Medellin, Colombia, under the auspices of the US State Department to give eight days of talks at the Centro Colombo Americano. This was followed by appearances in Málaga and Pamplona, Spain, the latter to mark the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s last visit to the town he had put on the international map with his first popular novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).
The 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death (by suicide on July 2nd, 1961) prompted a great demand for her talks all over the US with many interviews in US and foreign media, including an interview with the BBC Radio 4 that has been aired a number of times.
Valerie Hemingway was a visiting scholar in the Honors Department of Montana State University, Billings for the Spring 2012 semester.
In May 2012 her memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, was optioned by an Irish film company.
Speech Topics
Running with the Bulls: Hemingway as I Know Him
In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokes the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway's last years. Swept up in the wild revelry that always exploded around Hemingway, Valerie found herself dancing in the streets of Pamplona, cheering bullfighters at Valencia, careening around hairpin turns in Provence, and savoring the panorama of Paris from her attic room in the Ritz.
From lunches with Orson Welles to midnight serenades by mysterious troubadours, from a rooftop encounter with Castro to numbing hospital vigils, Valerie Hemingway played an intimate, indispensable role in the lives of two generations of Hemingways. This memoir, by turns luminous, enthralling, and devastating, is the account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her astonishing years of living as a Hemingway."
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