Cockeyed Happy

Book excerpt: "Streamlined and impacting, Darla Worden's Cockeyed Happy could be construed as a narrative of the author himself, a compelling account of Hemingway's summers in Wyoming—and I can think of no finer compliment."—Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries In March 1928, after the phenomenal success of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway returned to the United States with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—the stylish Vogue editor and scorned "other woman" who would give up everything to be with him and, in the end, lose it all. The couple fled Paris in the wake of the huge gossip storm about the American author's affair and abandonment of his wife and son. Escaping to Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains to write while Pauline recovered from the birth of their first child, he finished A Farewell to Arms and fell in love with the land around him. Pauline soon joined him in Yellowstone and Jackson Hole. In Cockeyed Happy Darla Worden tells the little-known story of Hemingway and Pauline during six summers from 1928 to 1939—from smitten newlywed to bored, restless husband and ultimately to philanderer as he falls in love with another woman once again.