Original photo by Photo 12/ Alamy Stock Photo
Ernest wasn’t the only eccentric Hemingway. Leicester, the younger brother of the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises, was also a writer and used the proceeds from his biography, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, to establish his own micronation. He did so on July 4, 1964, citing the obscure U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856 to claim an 8-by-30-foot bamboo raft floating 8 miles off the coast of Jamaica, in international waters, as his own sovereign land. The Guano Islands Act grants U.S. citizens the right to claim, on behalf of the U.S., any unoccupied “island, rock, or key” where valuable guano (read: bird droppings used as fertilizer) can be found. Patriot that he was, Leicester ceded half of his humble territory to the U.S. and declared the other half the Republic of New Atlantis.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibThough they were the only boys in the family, Leicester and Ernest Hemingway had four sisters: Mercelline, Ursula, Madelaine, and Carol. Ernest, who was born in 1899, was the second-oldest after Marcelline, while Leicester (born in 1915) was the youngest.
As is often the case with micronations, the founder of New Atlantis took it more seriously than anyone else. He drafted a constitution that was actually just the United States Constitution with “New Atlantis” replacing every instance of “United States,” created stamps, enlisted his wife to design a nice flag, and declared shark teeth and carob beans to be the country’s official currency, called “scruples.” Not long after Leicester Hemingway was voted the first president of New Atlantis in what we can only assume was a landslide, however, the country’s coffers ran empty (perhaps due to a lack of taxpayer revenue). The country’s primary activity seems to have been issuing stamps — meant to finance marine protections in the area — but the Universal Postal Union never recognized the stamps, or the country. Within a few years of its founding, the raft became untethered during a storm, drifted out to sea, and was destroyed, consigning New Atlantis to the dustbin of history.
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______ was the godmother of Ernest Hemingway’s first son, Jack.
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Gertrude Stein was the godmother of Ernest Hemingway’s first son, Jack.
Ernest Hemingway preferred to write standing up.
Every writer has their own routine, and it’s little surprise that the A Farewell to Arms scribe’s was as idiosyncratic as he was. Ernest Hemingway preferred to write in the morning, and did so standing up. This was “a working habit he has had from the beginning,” according to The Paris Review, and he might have picked up the habit from his editor, Maxwell Perkins. And though he preferred the pencil, Hemingway turned to the typewriter when he needed to get something down especially quickly, such as dialogue: “When the people are talking, I can hardly write it fast enough or keep up with it,” he told The New Yorker in 1950.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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