The daughter-in-law of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway will speak Sunday (March 30) at West Virginia University.
Valerie Hemingway, who wrote a memoir,Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways,and blogs athttp://www.valhem.blogspot.com, will presentThe Ernest Hemingway I Knewat 7 p.m. in Elizabeth Moore Hall on WVU s Downtown Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
From 1959 until Ernest Hemingways death in 1961, she worked and traveled with the celebrated author as his secretary. In 1961, she became the assistant of his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and worked for the Hemingway estate, where she organized her father-in-laws papers for presentation to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
In addition, Valerie Hemingway worked for two decades in publishing and public relations, including two years as a fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Her articles have appeared in Saturday Review, The New York Times and Ski Magazine. She currently lives in Bozeman, Mont.
After more than 40 years of near silence on her time with the Hemingway family, she wroteRunning with the Bulls,detailing her life as a member of Ernest Hemingways inner circle. The memoir is widely praised for its inside look at the final years of his life.
It is one of the best books on Hemingway that I have read, and it has material to be found nowhere else on Ernest, Mary and Greg Hemingway,author Norman Mailer noted.
In �€~Running with the Bulls,Valerie Hemingway, an honest and graceful writer, takes us inside Papa Hemingways complicated psyche, inner circle and family in a fresh and instructive fashion. Its a stunner,wrote former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw.
The day following her presentation, Valerie Hemingway will serve as a visiting lecturer for two English courses; meet with faculty, staff and students of WVU s Department of English; and attend a private reception in her honor. These classroom events are not open to the general public.Her appearance at WVU is made possible through the generous support of David Fogarty of Morgantown.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime event,said Donald Hall, professor and Jackson Family Distinguished Chair of WVU s Department of English.This is a wonderful opportunity for community members, students and faculty to hear about the life of a world-famous author, Ernest Hemingway, from the perspective of another extraordinary writer and storyteller, Valerie Hemingway.
For more information, contact Rebecca Herod, marketing and communications coordinator for WVU s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, at 304-293-7405 ext. 5251 or Rebecca.Herod@mail.wvu.edu .
More information about Valerie Hemingway can be found athttp://www.valeriehemingway.com.