Patrick Hemingway, 97, the second of famed author Ernest Hemingway’s sons, died Sept. 2, 2025 at his home in Bozeman, Montana. The last surviving child and the only Hemingway in three generations to live late into life, he remained very actively involved in preserving his father’s estate and literary legacy.
According to the Associated Press Obituary, he lived in Africa, inspired by his father’s safaris, for many years and oversaw, and even edited, several of his father’s posthumously published works.
According to Patrick’s grandson, Patrick Hemingway Adams, who was quoted in the AP obit, “My grandfather was the real thing: a larger than life paradox from the old world; a consummate dreamer saddled with a scientific brain. He spoke half a dozen languages and solved complicated mathematical problems for fun, but his heart truly belonged to the written and visual arts.”
He and his father had a positive relationship. The AP obit includes a letter from the 2022 book, Dear Papa: The Letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway, in which his father writes, “I would rather fish with you and shoot with you than anybody that I have ever known since I was a boy and this is not because we are related.”
The AP piece also related that Patrick’s most ambitious undertaking was editing True at First Light, a fictionalized account of his father’s time in Africa in the mid-1950s, which had been left unfinished. He reportedly assembled the 1999 publication from some 800 pages of notes.
Patrick was born to Pauline Pfeiffer, his father’s second wife. After graduating from Harvard University, he purchased a farm in what is now Tanzania. He hunted, worked as a safari guide, educator and forestry officer in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the AP article reported.
He was the husband of Henrietta Broyles and Carol Thompson, and the father of Mina Hemingway (with his first wife). For the past 50-some years, he lived in Bozeman, Montana.
Scott Schwar, the former executive director and co-founder of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in Oak Park, said Patrick Hemingway visited the village on several occasions: In 1989 for the ceremony when his father’s official U.S. stamp was issued, Schwar shared the podium with Patrick, A.E. Hotchner, and village officials. In 1999, he attended Oak Park’s Hemingway Centennial Birthday Celebration at the Birthplace Home on Oak Park Avenue, where Ernie was born, and again when the Birthplace Home was designation an Illinois Literary Landmark. He also participated in the Centennial Literary Conference, where he delivered the Keynote Address and joined a panel with his brother Jack, Hotchner, and Milt Wolf.
And he returned on Nov. 2, 2002 for program at Unity Temple with Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, titled, “Wright and Hemingway in Oak Park: Walking on Common Ground,” where they discussed the impact of Oak Park on their famous forebears.
In conversation, Schwar said, Patrick recalled that his father was “always reading” and that he loved receiving and writing letters, many of which are included in The Hemingway Letters Project headed by Sandra Spanier, which will eventually total 17 books and some 6,000 letters.
“Patrick also toured the high school,” Schwar recalled, “and said how grateful his father said he always was for the education he received in Oak Park.”