Books: The Hero of the Code

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you.

Ernest Hemingway, the storyteller who wrote those lines, was brushing his teeth. It had been, his wife later recalled, a "calm, good-natured" dinner, and she was sitting in her bedroom in their house in Ketchum, Idaho, when an Italian song she had not thought of for years came into her mind— Tutti Mi Chiamano Bionda (Everybody Tells Me I'm Blonde). Mary Hemingway walked across the hall to her husband's room to sing it...