Hemingway Dies: American Literature Loses Its Boldest Voice
He died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. He'd been receiving electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic, which his friends said destroyed his memory and his ability to write. He couldn't finish a sentence for the inscription at the Kennedy Library. The man who had defined masculine restraint in American prose — the iceberg theory, nothing wasted, nothing explained — sat at his typewriter and couldn't manage a paragraph. He was 61. The shotgun was his father's.
July 2, 1961
65 years ago
What Else Happened on July 2
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