July 21 is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Hemingway. Shortly before his sixty-second birthday he ordered a Boss and Company, finely crafted English shotgun from Abercrombie and Fitch, then a top-end sporting goods store. With this gun he blew his brains out in his Idaho home. He suffered from mental illness and alcoholism.

Hemingway, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, has been acknowledged as a major influence by authors as varied as J.D. Salinger, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and Elmore Leonard. I simply remember being a little girl who was swept away by his mesmerizing words in the Old Man and the Sea. I read and studied many more of his works in college and grad school, but nothing will compare to my time in that fishing boat when I was twelve years old.

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