Michael Palin thinks of Ernest Hemingway as the greatest travel writer since Homer.
Just the watering holes he wrote about still trade on the memory that Hemingway drank here: Harry’s Bar in Venice, La Floridita in Havana, Sloppy Joe’s in Key West.
Hemingway put Pamplona, Spain and Mt. Kilimanjaro, Kenya on the map of lasting literature – not just as datelines but as incomparable places, in prose that told the truth of first light in Africa. And he got “the remorse and sorrow,” as he said, “the people and the places and how the weather was.”
Since his Monty Python years, Michael Palin has moved on into a remarkably diverse career as an actor/writer and has spent much of the last ten years traveling the world with a camera-in-tow.
After traveling from north to south pole, around the world and even circling the Pacific Rim, Michael Palin decided to follow the adventuring steps of Ernest Hemingway.
And now he wants to talk about the American novelist who changed prose style and men’s image of manhood, and spent all but ten years of his working life outside the United States-in Italy, too, and Paris, the city he loved best in all the world.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Michael Palin