Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

Andrea di Robilant. Stated first edition, first printing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Both unclipped dust jacket and hardcover are in Near Fine condition. No writing or markings found in this copy, 348 pp. 

A study of Hemingway and the woman, the beautiful Italian teenager Adriana Ivancich, who inspired perhaps his least acclaimed novel, "Across the River and into the Trees."

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called "absolutely god-damned wonderful." A year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Hemingway hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade when he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. "Here Andrea di Robilant re-creates this surprising, years-long relationship, during which Adriana inspired a man thirty years her senior to complete his great final work. Hemingway used Adriana as the model for Renata in Across the River and into the Trees, and continued to visit Venice to see her; when the Ivanciches traveled to Cuba, Adriana was there as he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. The illuminating story of writer and muse--which also examines the cost to a young woman of her association with a larger-than-life literary celebrity--Autumn in Venice is an intimate look at Hemingway's final years."