John Hemingway Writer's Reading

John Hemingway's critically acclaimed memoir Strange Tribe (2007) examines the complex relationship between his father, Dr. Gregory Hemingway, and his grandfather, Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway.

The son of a bipolar father and schizophrenic mother, he spent his early years being shuffled from one home to another. After college, he moved to Italy as a way of distancing himself from his troubled family background. One of the unresolved questions for him was how his father, a cross-dresser and transsexual, might fit with the public image of his grandfather as an icon of male masculinity. He discovered that both men, besides being bipolar, were also fascinated by androgyny. As he recounts, the macho myth surrounding his grandfather was only half the story.

John Hemingway was born in Miami in 1960. The memoir probes his difficult childhood, his studies, and his move to Italy. He studied history and Italian at UCLA, and after graduating, moved to Milan, Italy, in 1983, where he pursued a career in writing and translating. His articles have appeared in several Italian newspapers such as l'Unità and Libero. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera based on his childhood and the father/son relationship. After leaving Italy and spending a year in Spain, Hemingway now lives in Montreal, Canada, with his wife and two children.

Cosponsored by Ohio State's Department of English and Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities.