Mary Welsh Hemingway

[1] In 1944, Welsh met American author Ernest Hemingway while covering the war in London, and they became intimate.

[2] Welsh's and Hemingway's temperaments were well-suited to one another; while Hemingway's previous wife had chafed against his efforts to assert his dominance, Mary Welsh wrote, "I wanted him to be the Master, to be stronger and cleverer than I; to remember constantly how big he was and how small I was."

[4] It was after they had moved to Ketchum, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, that Mary was awakened by a loud noise, and discovered that her husband had "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun.

[5] According to biographer James Mellow, Hemingway had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer of their Ketchum home, and with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend", had shot himself.

[7] Following Ernest's suicide in 1961, Mary acted as his literary executor, and was responsible for the publication of A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and other posthumous works.

Mary and Ernest Hemingway in Cuba
Mary and Ernest Hemingway on safari (1953–1954)