On Ernest Hemingway's great love: His boat

Paul Hendrickson's biography of Ernest Hemingway is a story of love and companionship, between Hemingway and Pilar — his boat.

"She had been intimately his, and he hers, for 27 years, which were his final 27 years," Hendrickson writes of Pilar, the fishing vessel Hemingway docked in Cuba.

When Hendrickson first saw Pilar, which has outlived Hemingway by more than half a century, the boat was "dying in the sun" at Finca Vigia, Hemingway's house 12 miles outside Havana. Now, with Cuba's tourism industry kicking into high gear thanks to the thawing of relations between the island nation and the U.S., the boat has been restored.

It's "shiny as a new penny now," Hendrickson said, but the stories in his book relate the decades in which Hemingway steered it, in search of blue marlin off the Cuba coast.

The biography focuses on the years 1934 to 1961, when Hemingway threw himself into the life of a fishermen, drawing inspiration from the sea.

Of Pilar, Hendrickson writes, "He owned her, he fished her, he rode her through 3 wives, the Nobel Prize and all his ruin."

Hendrickson joined MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about Hemingway and his relationship with the sea, and with the public, as he became the most famous living writer of his time.

For the full interview with Paul Hendrickson on "Hemingway's Boat," use the audio player above.