Between 1948 and 1961, Earnest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.

A. E. Hotchner did not come to the task of adapting Hemingway's seven-page short story "After the Storm" with apparent disadvantages. After all, he personally knew Ernest Hemingway; he had traveled with him to Paris, Pamplona, Venice, the Riviera. He had studied Hemingway's work and already adapted for the television or movie screen fifteen of the Nobel Prize–winning writer's works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls. Still, in the matter of adaptation, as Hotchner shows in the essay that opens this volume, close familiarity with an artist's work or personality does not necessarily simplify the challenge to the adapter. In addition to Hotchner's essay, which identifies the problems posed by adaptations of works not written for the screen, the book includes the complete texts of both Hemingway's story and the screenplay that converts it into a full-length feature film—making this volume invaluable to film students, movie fans, screenwriters, and Hemingway readers alike.