--- title: 'Hemingway Almost Killed Me': A LIFE Photographer Remembers description: LIFE photographer Alfred Eisentaedt recalls a famously disastrous 1952 photo shoot in Cuba with a drunk, belligerent Ernest Hemingway. canonical: https://time.com/3880529/hemingway-almost-killed-me-a-life-photographer-remembers/ author: Ben Cosgrove article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-07-21T01:07:33.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:03:38.955Z og:title: 'Hemingway Almost Killed Me': A LIFE Photographer Remembers og:description: LIFE photographer Alfred Eisentaedt recalls a famously disastrous 1952 photo shoot in Cuba with a drunk, belligerent Ernest Hemingway. og:url: https://time.com/3880529/hemingway-almost-killed-me-a-life-photographer-remembers/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1b1a9d2c7e62a9a1/69884c2906f2c1517b339bee/140715-ernest-hemingway-eisenstaedt1.jpg?branch=production&width=1920&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Ernest Hemingway 1952 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Hemingway Almost Killed Me': A LIFE Photographer Remembers twitter:description: LIFE photographer Alfred Eisentaedt recalls a famously disastrous 1952 photo shoot in Cuba with a drunk, belligerent Ernest Hemingway. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1b1a9d2c7e62a9a1/69884c2906f2c1517b339bee/140715-ernest-hemingway-eisenstaedt1.jpg?branch=production&width=1920&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 'Hemingway Almost Killed Me': A LIFE Photographer Remembers by [Ben Cosgrove](https://time.com/author/ben-cosgrove/) ## Ben Cosgrove Jul 21, 2014 1:07 AM UTC  Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, 1952. Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, 1952.Alfred Eisensteadt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images by [Ben Cosgrove](https://time.com/author/ben-cosgrove/) ## Ben Cosgrove Jul 21, 2014 1:07 AM UTC Ernest Hemingway, LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt once stated, “was the most difficult man I ever photographed.” Coming from someone who (as we’ve pointed out [elsewhere on LIFE.com](http://life.time.com/culture/ernest-hemingway-in-cuba-rare-photos-of-a-legend-in-decline-1952/#1)) made portraits of emperors, scientists, testy athletes, egomaniac actors, insecure actresses and once, famously, a glaring, homunculus-like Nazi minister of propaganda, [Joseph Goebbels](http://life.time.com/history/goebbels-in-geneva-1933-behind-a-classic-alfred-eisenstaedt-photo/#1), that bald assertion about Hemingway is striking, indeed. [\[MORE: “Hemingway in Cuba: Portrait of a Legend in Decline”\]](http://life.time.com/culture/ernest-hemingway-in-cuba-rare-photos-of-a-legend-in-decline-1952/#1) Here, LIFE.com features one of Eisenstaedt’s photos from a famous, disastrous 1952 photo shoot in Cuba—a picture that, in light of Eisenstaedt’s memories, carries with it a hint of genuine menace. In a 1992 interview published in John Loengard’s [_LIFE Photographers: What They Saw_](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Photographers-What-They-Saw/dp/0821225189), Eisenstaedt recalls that, when he went to Cuba in ’52 to photograph “Papa,” the writer was drunk “from morning till evening.” --- > “” --- The myth that has grown around Hemingway, and that Hemingway himself assiduously nurtured—that of the tough, hard-driving, hard-drinking, larger-than-life figure who hunts big game on the savannah, cheers toreadors, covers wars and always, always writes—endures because, deep down, that’s what so many of us want to believe the lives of our literary lions really looked like. Far fewer of us, meanwhile, recall that a life lived on that scale, and at that pace, often peters out into a series of small, sordid scenes. When Hemingway killed himself in July 1961, blowing out his brains with, it is said, his favorite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, he was a shadow of the man who reinvented American literature four decades before and who embodied a new American archetype—the macho novelist-adventurer—for most of his working life. He was 61 years old.  Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, 1952. 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