Patrick Hemingway
June 28, 1928 — Paris, France
Patrick Hemingway was an American writer, professional hunter, and wildlife conservationist who spent much of his adult life in East Africa, building a life of his own as a naturalist and writer in Tanzania and later in Montana, known for the personal resolve with which he established an independent existence and identity despite the overwhelming shadow of his father, Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway.
A Hemingway in Africa
Born on June 28, 1928 in Paris, Patrick Miller Hemingway was the second son of Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. He grew up between France, Key West, and Cuba, absorbing the same love of sport, hunting, and the outdoors that his father had instilled in all his children. After graduating from Harvard in 1950, Patrick chose a path that took him away from his father's literary world: he emigrated to Tanzania (then Tanganyika), where he became a professional safari hunter and guide, one of the very few Americans to work in that profession. He worked in East Africa for many years, eventually becoming a citizen of Tanzania and marrying a woman he met there. His professional hunting career gave him an expertise in wildlife and conservation that made him a respected figure in African wildlife management circles quite apart from his family name.
Wildlife Management and Writing
Patrick became a professional hunter and game manager in Tanzania, where professional hunting had evolved by the 1970s into wildlife management and conservation work. He was deeply committed to the idea that regulated hunting, conducted by trained professionals, was compatible with and indeed necessary for conservation in African conditions. He wrote about Africa and wildlife for various publications and in 2000 published My African Travels, reflecting on his decades on the continent. He was also involved in efforts to preserve his father's literary estate and was a thoughtful and occasionally outspoken commentator on his father's life and legend. After years in Africa, he eventually retired to Bozeman, Montana, where he continued to write and give interviews.
Did You Know?
Patrick Hemingway outlived all of his immediate family by decades. His father Ernest died in 1961; his brothers John and Gregory both predeceased him. He was the last surviving child of Ernest Hemingway and the last major direct link to the world his father described and created. In interviews given in his later years, Patrick was characteristically measured about his father: admiring but clear-eyed, aware of both his father's greatness and his failures as a parent and as a human being. He died in February 2025 in Bozeman, Montana, at the age of 96.
Legacy
Patrick Hemingway's life is a study in the difficulty and the possibility of living in the shadow of a legendary parent. He chose Africa partly to find a world his father had visited but not inhabited — a place where he could be known first as a professional, and only secondarily as a son. He succeeded in that ambition: among those who knew him in Tanzania and in the wildlife management community, he was known and respected on his own terms. His writing is quieter and more observational than his father's, less concerned with drama and more with the patient accumulation of knowledge about animals and places. He died in 2025, having outlived his father by 64 years and having made a life that, while necessarily defined in part by his origins, was genuinely and substantially his own.