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would be the most important and reliable element of his life. Friends and lovers would come and go, but he would always have his writing. Hemingway's personal experiences would be used in his fiction. If actual events worked, he would stick closely to what happened. If not, he would invent whatever he needed to make a story work. He used himself as a character as well as his friends. And likely his borrowing from real life is what cost him his friendships. Friend Harold Loeb was the basis of the Robert Cohn character in The Sun Also Rises. Thirty-five years after its publication, he was still smarting over the way Hemingway portrayed him. In his 1936 short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway used a conversation he had with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me." Hemingway transcribed the quote accurately, but Fitzgerald claimed the rest of the anecdote had been false.

Although the friendship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway was a volatile one, it was one of mutual respect. In the beginning, Fitzgerald, the wealthy successful writer was Hemingway's mentor and hardest critic. He was influential in Hemingway's rewriting the ending to A Farewell to Arms. Six months and thirty-nine drafts later, Hemingway came up with the understated final line, "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." When Hemingway became the more successful author of the two, the roles reversed, and he became the mentor.

Thirty years after his first stay in Paris, Hemingway dug out his Paris sketches and wrote A Moveable Feast , which was published posthumously in 1964. Although published as a straight reminiscence, the ending passage of the Preface reads, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." In an unpublished draft of this passage he wrote, "No one can write true facts as reminiscence."

One story that was not based on personal experience but has often been speculated as such is The Old Man and the Sea. In 1936 he originally heard the story about an old Cuban fisherman who struggles with a fish for days only to lose it to sharks, but Hemingway did not write it until 1951. Readers analyzed the story for metaphors and symbolism, but Hemingway rebuffed the theories. Hemingway called this story "an epilogue to all my writing and what I have learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live. It will destroy the school of criticism that claims I can write about nothing except myself and my own experiences."

Except for the posthumous fictional memoirs, A Moveable Feast and True at First Light, Hemingway would not publish a big book again. What propelled him to attain literary success was also what lead him to despair and loneliness. In a draft of his Nobel acceptance speech he wrote, "There is no lonelier man than the writer when he is writing except the suicide. Nor is there any happier, nor more exhausted man when he has written well. If he has written well everything that is him has gone into the writing and he faces another morning when he must do it again. There is always another morning and another morning." But after July 2, 1961, there would be no more mornings. After struggling for years with diabetes, hypertension, and depression, Ernest Hemingway put a gun to his head and ended his life.

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