Mary Welsh Hemingway (April 5, 1908 – November 26, 1986) was an American journalist and the fourth wife (and widow) of Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Minnesota, Welsh was a daughter of a lumberman. In 1938, she married Lawrence Miller Cook, a drama student from Ohio. Their life together was short and they soon separated. After the separation, Mary moved to Chicago and began working at the Chicago Daily News, where she met Will Lang Jr.. The two formed a fast friendship and worked together on several assignments. A career move presented itself during a vacation trip to London, when Mary started a new job at the London Daily Express. The position soon brought her assignments in Paris during the years preceding World War II.
After the fall of France in 1940, Welsh returned to London to cover the events of the War. She also attended and reported on the press conferences of Winston Churchill. Mary made an accusation of plagiarism against several fellow journalists, including Andy Rooney, although the accusations were proven false.
It was also during the war years that she married Australian journalist Noel Monks. In 1944 she met Ernest Hemingway in London and they became intimate.
In 1945, Mary Welsh divorced Noel Monks, and in March 1946, she married Ernest Hemingway, the ceremony taking place in Cuba. In August 1946, she had a miscarriage due to an ectopic pregnancy. Mary lived with Ernest in Cuba and, after 1959, in Ketchum, Idaho. After Ernest's suicide in 1961, Mary acted as his literary executor, and was responsible for the publication of A Moveable Feast and other posthumous works.
In 1976, she wrote her autobiography, How It Was. Further biographical details of Mary Welsh Hemingway can be found in the numerous Hemingway biographies and also in The Hemingway Women
Famous quotes containing the words mary, welsh and/or hemingway:
“The largest business in American handled by a woman is the Money Order Department of the Pittsburgh Post-office; Mary Steel has it in charge.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.”
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)