Hemingway Faces God

Abstract

Unpublished portions of the manuscript of Marcelline Hemingway Sanford's At the Hemingways tells of frequent corporal punishment when she and Ernest were young. Each time after being punished they were required by their father to kneel and ask a stern Old Testament God for forgiveness. By the time he finished high school Hemingway had begun a separation from his parents. This rift widened after World War I when his mother ordered him from the family cottage in Michigan. He found in Catholicism a Blessed Mother who gave unbounded love and a Father who would give absolution, filling at least in part his spiritual and psychological needs.