Mary Welsh Hemingway

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Mary Welsh Hemingway (April 5, 1908 – November 26, 1986) was an American journalist and the fourth wife (and widow) of Ernest Hemingway.

Born in Minnesota, Welsh was a daughter of a lumberman. When she was 32, she married Lawrence Miller Cook, a drama student from Ohio. Their life together was short and they soon separated. After the separation, Mary moved to Chicago and landed a job at the Chicago Daily News where she met Will Lang Jr., with whom she formed a fast friendship, and the pair worked together on several assignments. A career move presented itself during a vacation trip to London, when Mary landed a new job at the London Daily Express. The position soon saw her assigned to work in Paris ahead of what was to become World War II.

After the fall of France, Welsh returned to London to cover the events of the War and attended and reported on the press conferences of Winston Churchill. Mary made an accusation of plagiarism against a fellow journalist, Andy Rooney, although the accusations were proven false. It was also during the war years that she married Australian journalist Noel Monks. In 1944 she met Ernest Hemingway in London and they became intimate. In 1945, Mary Welsh divorced Noel Monks, and in March 1946, she married Ernest Hemingway, the ceremony taking place in Cuba. In August 1946, she had a miscarriage due to an ectopic pregnancy. Mary lived with Ernest in Cuba, Key West, Florida and finally, Ketchum, Idaho.

In 1976, she wrote her autobiography, How It Was. Further biographical details of Mary Welsh Hemingway can be found in the numerous Hemingway biographies and also in The Hemingway Women ^[1]