Mary Welsh Hemingway, born in 1908 in the small town of Walker, Minnesota, had a humble beginning but the events in her life were anything but. Considered to be far less intelligent and attractive compared to Hemingway's other wives, Mary was by far the most uninhibited and even learned to keep up with Hemingway's infamous drinking.
Like Ernest, Mary was married multiple times before they met. She married her first husband Lawrence Cook in 1938 and they were quickly divorced, which led her to an opportunity to live in London, England and write for the Daily Express. During that time, she was in Paris, France in the years before World War II, and then fled back to London to report on the war after the fall of France. She married her second husband, a man named Noel Monks during the war but in 1944 met Ernest Hemingway. In 1945 she divorced Monks and left with Ernest to Cuba where they were wed in 1946.
Ernest loved Mary, but did not fully trust her, because of her lust for social life. The relationship was turbulent and when Hemingway invited Adriana Ivancich, a young woman with whom he fell in love, to live with him and Mary in Cuba, the marriage was never the same. As Ernest's mental health declined, Mary gave him the choice of being institutionalized or suicide. She left the gun room unlocked and Hemingway chose to shoot himself to punish Mary for giving him the choice. For months, she claimed it was an accident but eventually admitted it was a suicide because of her guilt she published A Moveable Feast and other posthumous works in his honor and died in 1986 after years of alcoholism.
