Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow
The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage
Ruth A. Hawkins

The only biography of Ernest Hemingway’s second marriage

It was the glittering intellectual world of 1920s Paris expatriates in which Pauline Pfeiffer, a writer for Vogue, met Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, among a circle of friends that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Dorothy Parker. Pauline grew close to Hadley but eventually forged a stronger bond with Hemingway himself; with her stylish looks and dedication to Hemingway’s writing, Pauline became the source of “unbelievable happiness” for Hemingway and, in 1927, his second wife.

Pauline was her husband’s best editor and critic, and her wealthy family provided moral and financial support, including the conversion of an old barn to a dedicated writing studio at the family home in Piggott, Arkansas. The marriage lasted thirteen years, some of Hemingway’s most productive, and the couple had two children. But the unbelievable happiness met with final sorrow, as Hemingway wrote, and Pauline would be the second of Hemingway’s four wives.

Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow paints a full picture of Pauline and the essential role she played in Ernest Hemingway’s becoming one of America’s greatest literary figures.

Ruth A. Hawkins has been an administrator at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro for more than thirty years and established its Arkansas
Heritage Sites program, which includes the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott. She has been recognized at the state, regional, and national level for her work in historic preservation and heritage tourism.

June
6 x 9, 391 pages
49 images, index
$34.95 cloth
978-1-55728-974-2