Suicide always leaves the question of “Why?” in its wake, and this is especially true when the person who commits the act seemingly has so much to live for.
Such is the case of Ernest Hemingway. As his friend, A. E. Hotchner wondered, why would someone “whom many critics call the greatest writer of his century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as his genius, a winner of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, a soldier of fortune with a home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, where he hunted in the winter, an apartment in New York, a specially rigged yacht to fish the Gulf Stream, an available apartment at the Ritz in Paris and the Gritti in Venice, a solid marriage . . . good friends everywhere . . . put a shotgun to his head and [kill] himself”?
While an answer to this kind of question can never be offered with any certainty, given the complexity of mental health, and the time that has passed, there are several plausible possible explanations.
