Hemingway, Fitzgerald & Hollywood Legends
A little news…
Just wrapped up my book, Hemingway’s Faith, on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday (September 24), no less… now available for pre-order across all platforms including Shakespeare and Company in Paris!... it tells a new story about Hemingway, if that’s possible…
As Charles Scribner III wrote, “Our two Scribner biographies of Hemingway—the monumental Carlos Baker and the critical Anthony Burgess—ignore or, worse, dismiss the powerful if alternating current of Hemingway's adoptive Catholicism throughout his life and work. Finally, a half-century later, Mary Claire Kendall casts a beam of light through the chiaroscuro of that author's troublous life. It is quite simply the most revealing portrait of the inner-Hemingway since A Moveable Feast. Faith is a gift; this book is a treasure.”
So honored to have this endorsement…
Now it’s on to a book that has me reading The Great Gatsby and watching Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story…
Also, this summer, the second in my series on Hollywood legends, Oasis in Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness & Lemmon, was published, complemented by a series of articles in Aleteia, featuring Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Ethel Barrymore, and Mary Astor, along with features about various screen gems, many starring these legends—just recently On the Waterfront, which hit theatres 70 years ago this month.
***
Coincidentally, just as I was writing this, Pres. Donald Trump was at a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin introducing a fellow by the name of “Scott Fitzgerald,” and he said twice, “I love that name”—“must be a great writer!”… Trump, of course, developed the Commodore Hotel in the late 70s, transforming it into the Grand Hyatt… The Commodore Hotel is where the Fitzgeralds decamped from, Scott wrote a Princeton friend, and moved to Weston, Connecticut, their first home after being kicked out of the Biltmore Hotel, it is reported elsewhere, shortly after they wed on April 3, 1920 in the sacristy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the heels of This Side of Paradise’s publication. But, in The Beautiful and the Damned, it’s Marietta, Connecticut to which young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert decamp from The Plaza Hotel. One thing’s clear. No matter the names, it’s art of the finest order.
***
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends. The sequel, Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness & Lemmon, was just published. Her biography of Ernest Hemingway, titled Hemingway’s Faith, is being published Christmas 2024 by Rowman & Littlefield, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. She writes a regular bi-monthly column for Aleteia on legends of Hollywood and hidden screen gems.