Ernest Hemingway has had one of the most active posthumous lives of any writer. He died in 1961 and since that time there have been five books published "by Ernest Hemingway." These books include A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), The Garden of Eden (1986), and True at First Light (1999). A sixth posthumous installment was published in September of 2005 and this may be the very last posthumous work we see from the great Hemingway.

Two months ago, I watched "Ernest Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea" on PBS. The program told the story of Hemingway mainly through Hemingway's own words. As the program progressed, I sat in disbelief listening to all the lengthy quotes from Hemingway's works. While I think this is an appropriate way to tell the story of a writer's life, I couldn't help wondering what type of arrangement the filmmaker (DeWitt Sage) made with the Hemingway estate to allow all of the excerpts to be used.

It has been four years since Gregory Hemingway, the third and youngest son of Ernest Hemingway, died. The strange circumstances surrounding his death while tragic were not entirely unexpected, for Gregory Hemingway was as tortured an individual as his father.

Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." The fundamental question in my mind regarding Hemingway's suicide is could it or could it have not been prevented?

This has always been a difficult subject for me. I am torn between feeling guilt for having read someone's private letters (Hemingway stated in writing that he never wanted his letters published.) and feeling absolute elation that we, the reading public, have access to these important literary and historical documents.

I was a freshman in college when I first heard the closing line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. A charismatic literature professor holding a diet coke in one hand and a piece of literary Americana in the other stood in front of a class of thirty some odd students and said, " 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' . . . perhaps the greatest closing line in all of literature." I remember being more taken by his seemingly sweeping statement than by the sentence itself. So taken, in fact, that I was compelled to discuss the issue further with him during his office hours.