Tony Castro is a historian, Hemingway scholar, journalist, and author of multiple books including the best-selling Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son, hailed by The New York Times as the definitive biography about the baseball Hall of Fame legend. A former national correspondent for The Washington Post, Castro has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Texas Observer, and Sports Illustrated. He was given a special tour of La Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, arranged for him by Fidel Castro in 1967, was among the first to view the collection of Hemingway papers opened to researchers by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and has long known screenwriter Teo Davis, the son of Bill and Anne Davis, the American expatriates who hosted Hemingway’s last visits to Spain. He lives in Los Angeles.
Tony Castro has always brought a remarkable talent for inhabiting
the very essence and spirit of his subjects, and the same is true
in his new book, Looking for Hemingway. Castro seems to sense that
Hemingway is acutely aware of his own impending mortality as he
travels to Spain for one last hurrah. He has written a splendid and
insightful account of that final journey.
*Bob Vickrey, syndicated columnist*
My longtime friend and virtual brother Tony Castro came to know
this special time and place of Hemingway’s life in Spain and with
my family and our home La Consula in the south of Spain as if he’d
been there. And he has fabulously recreated it in Looking for
Hemingway, a brilliant book of incredible scope and powerful
insight into the man and myth that the world knew as Ernest
Hemingway. I lived that time once, and I’ve relived it again here
in these pages. This book is a treasure in understanding who
Hemingway was and his indelible impact on the people whose lives he
touched.
*Teo Davis, son of Bill and Annie Davis, Hemingway’s hosts in
Spain*
I had no idea there was so much still to be written about
Hemingway. Tony Castro has found much gold left behind by the
authors and scholars who came before him. At the start of a single
chapter, I found anecdotes about Lauren Bacall, F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Hollywood that I’d never heard before – and I am an avid
collector of such anecdotes. Looking for Hemingway is a different
way of looking at Hemingway and should shape all our attitudes
about the man and his work from here on in.
*Allen Barra, author of Mickey and Willie: The Parallel Lives of
the Golden Age of Baseball*
Ernest Hemingway was a great writer, a lousy husband, a braggart,
and often treated his friends terribly. But as Tony Castro has
written in Looking for Hemingway, the man fascinated the world from
his birth to his death. Through Castro’s narrative, I got to meet
Ava Gardner, Manolete, Picasso, Lauren Bacall, and Bill and Anne
Davis, the couple that hosted EH for the last years of his life.
Like one of Woody Allen’s movies, I was taken back to the era of
the Lost Generation, and I loved every minute of it.
*Peter Golenbock, author of American Prince (with Tony Curtis) and
Presumed Guilty (with Jose Baez.)*
Tony Castro's Looking for Hemingway is an intriguing glimpse into
the life of the aging Ernest Hemingway in 1959, as he makes another
trip to Spain and continues his decades-long fascination with
bullfighting. In Castro’s lively yet poignant portrayal,
Hemingway's glamorous 60th birthday party in his friends' beautiful
villa contrasts with his efforts to recapture his youth. A
worthwhile addition to the literature on Hemingway and his
circle.
*Deborah Kalb, journalist and co-author of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam
and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama*
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