Norman Mailer, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-four, had long been considered the successor to Ernest Hemingway's literary throne. Mailer's first book, The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, was a bestseller and prompted many people to label this twenty-five-year-old writer as the "new Hemingway." Did Mailer deserve this distinction? Who better to answer that question than Ernest Hemingway himself.

In the many biographies written about him, Ernest Hemingway has been portrayed as a distant son who harbored a great deal of hatred for his mother. He seems to have held her partly responsible for his father's 1928 suicide and he didn't attend her funeral when she died in June of 1951. However, a new collection of letters show a different side of Hemingway, that of a dutiful son.

An advance copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls signed by Ernest Hemingway and including his handwritten corrections will be auctioned off in November by Swann Galleries. Ernest Hemingway literary memorabilia has always fared well financially in the bidding marketplace and this proof is expected to continue in that tradition.

I recently paid a visit to YouTube, the web's premiere source for online video, and performed a search for "Ernest Hemingway." Numerous video listings were returned and I watched many of them. Now for your viewing pleasure, I present the three best Ernest Hemingway videos that I found on YouTube.

In September of last year, I wrote a blog entry about the USDA wanting the Hemingway cats of Key West to be licensed. They believed that the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum was "violating the Animal Welfare Act and subject to a daily fine of $200 per cat, or nearly $10,000 a day." Last week, the Key West City Commission disputed the claims of the USDA and ruled that Hemingway's famous felines can stay.

Ernest Hemingway's influence on our culture never ceases to amaze me. He has societies in Michigan, Oak Park, Illinois, and Japan dedicated to preserving his memory. A scholarly journal (The Hemingway Review) bears his name, as does a literary award (PEN/Hemingway Award), not to mention an entire marina in Havana, Cuba. And now you can even find Hemingway on stage portrayed by actor Jordan Rhodes.

For many years, I have been trying to confirm that Ernest Hemingway is not the author of the following quotation: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." In July 2006, the case appeared to be solved when I received a source for the quotation, a story titled "Blood Sport" by Ken Purdy. Recently, information was received that may prompt me to reopen the case.

On April 2, 2007, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, MA made available to scholars thirty letters written by Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich. The letters span the years 1949 to 1959 and show Hemingway's enormous affection for Dietrich. Some passages in the letters even have people wondering if Hemingway and Dietrich were lovers.

Martha Gellhorn always disliked being referred to as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. She once said: "Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?" Outside of their brief marriage, there was a more tragic footnote that tied Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway together.

Ernest Hemingway makes great copy. So many articles simply must put in a Hemingway angle. Take this January 3, 2007 article from The Daily Telegraph, which begins: "A fast-growing chain of noodle restaurants that claims to serve only fish from healthy stocks has taken blue marlin off the menu after an investigation by The Daily Telegraph." If you were going to give this article the appropriate headline, what would it be?