A. E. Hotchner’s storied literary career spanned more than seven decades, beginning at Washington University in St. Louis, where he and Tennessee Williams were students in the same playwriting class. As a young magazine journalist, he met Ernest Hemingway in 1948 on assignment for Cosmopolitan and became his close friend, collaborator, and biographer; Papa Hemingway (1966), his memoir of their friendship, became an international bestseller translated into 28 languages.
Adapting Hemingway’s “The Battler” for television introduced Hotchner to Paul Newman, with whom he co-founded Newman’s Own and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp; he chronicled their 53-year friendship in Paul and Me. He wrote the authorized biographies Doris Day: Her Own Story and Sophia: Living and Loving, told the story of the Rolling Stones in Blown Away, and captured Manhattan’s most famous literary hotspot in Everyone Comes to Elaine’s.
Several of Hotchner's books have reached the screen: Steven Soderbergh turned his boyhood memoir, King of the Hill, into a feature film, and Looking for Miracles and The Man Who Lived at the Ritz were brought to television. His novels range from the Depression-era mystery The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom to the historical novels Treasure and Louisiana Purchase. He completed his final novel, Kissing the Wind, at the age of 102.
Hemingway entrusted Hotchner alone with adapting his short stories, and in television’s golden age he brought Hemingway’s work to NBC and CBS, from “The Killers” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to a two-part For Whom the Bell Tolls for Playhouse 90. He also wrote the screenplay for Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), featuring Paul Newman.
Hotchner was equally at home in the theater: his 1964 Broadway play The White House, starring Helen Hayes, was later presented at the White House for President Clinton, and his 1989 Broadway musical Welcome to the Club, with Cy Coleman, earned two Tony nominations. Along the way, he collaborated with Richard Rodgers on the musical Nefertitiand with Aaron Copland, who scored his 1957 CBS television play The World of Nick Adams, which Hotchner revived in 2001 as an all-star benefit. At 101, he fulfilled a longtime goal by co-writing a stage adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea with his son, Tim Hotchner.
