Four Days with Hemingway's Ghost
Four Days with Hemingway's Ghost is not a story of spooks and goblins. It's a powerful story about two men from two very different times. One man is mortal, the other is immortal. One is painfully ordinary, the other world famous. Jack Phelan is a forty-two-year-old underachiever who lives in South Florida. Although he mows lawns for a living, he's not what you might expect. He's got an exceptionally sharp mind and is a self-educated Hemingway aficionado. After Jack gets into an unlikely accident he's flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital, where he remains in a coma for four days. But somehow, minutes after he blacks out, he finds himself in Key West, Florida--rubbing shoulders with an aged Ernest Hemingway. Hem has been sent back down to help determine whether or not Jack has what it takes to write a book for "The Main Man above the clouds." But what Ernest doesn't know is that the book is to be about him. And that its purpose is to change the world's perception of the swaggering, hard-knuckled, macho myth he has become. Over the next four days, Jack Phelan and Ernest Hemingway travel to the legendary author's old haunts and meet up with many of his long gone friends. Some of these reunions are rollicking good times, others are highly emotional tests of strength. But wait. When their time together comes to an end, the story is still not over. That's when things really get interesting.