life:
July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies.
Incredibly, one of Hemingway’s most highly regarded novels, the short masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, was first published, in its entirety, in a single issue of LIFE magazine in September 1952.
LIFE’s Alfred Eisensstaedt went to Cuba to photograph Hemingway for the September 1952 issue, he encountered not a gracious (if perhaps prickly) fellow artist and man of letters, but a thoroughly disagreeable, paranoid, gin-sodden lunatic.
See the photos here.What is your favorite Ernest Hemingway novel or short story?
life:
We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little.
Here, rare color photos from the over-the-top celebrations that marked Hitler’s 50th birthday (April 20, 1939), as well as some of the obscenely gaudy gifts bestowed on the German leader by his peers and sycophants.Pictured: Adolf Hitler receives a model of a Condor airplane as a gift on his 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939. Beside Hitler (left) stands Capt. Hans Bauer, his personal pilot.
Mount Etna spews lava on the southern Italian island of Sicily February 9, 2012. Mount Etna is Europe’s tallest and most active volcano. [REUTERS/Antonio Parrinello]
This is a real photograph, from the days before retouching and all those wonderful things that make celebrities look like sticks nowadays. It was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1948. It was done to make surrealism “real.” And it did it amazingly.
