Papa's Trial: Hemingway in the Afterlife

Reliving that life
July, 1961. Ernest Hemingway, the world’s most famous writer, has just used his shotgun to get himself out of a life that had become insupportable.
Only… apparently death is not the end.
Apparently death and life have rules and possibilities he hadn’t suspected. And here he is on trial, required to examine his life as it looks from the other side, after the fact, not only from his point of view but also from those he interacted with.
His wives. His parents. His friends and adversaries. Everyone he touched in sixty years of intense living. His loves and almost-loves and sometimes-loves. His fellow authors, his publishers, his rivals and his mentors. He will confront them all.
In the course of the trial, he looks more closely at his achievements and failures, in the art he created and the people he touched. Mostly, he is faced with absorbing the impact of a life that stretched so far in so many directions: writer, voracious reader, connoisseur of fine art, fisherman, hunter, raconteur, warrior….
How well did he make use of his opportunities and talents? Who was he, and what did he do? What did it all mean? And how might it all have worked out differently?
No easy job, examining such complexity. But what he learns, how he changes, will determine where he goes from here.
Hemingway was the greatest writer America has yet given to the world. Papa’s Trial tells the story of his life, as it appeared to him and to those around him. Even long-time Hemingway devotees will find themselves looking at him in a new light as they consider what his life was, why it was that way, and what it might have been.