ERNEST HEMINGWAY - ERNEST HEMINGWAY BIOPIC IN THE WORKS

ERNEST HEMINGWAY BIOPIC IN THE WORKS

A biography of the late Ernest Hemingway has been optioned for a big-screen adaptation, reports claim.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, production company the Gotham Group have bought the rights to Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, by AE Hotchner.

Mr Hotchner, now 88, was a close friend of the Old Man and the Sea author in the decade before his 1961 suicide.

"It is rare that we have such intimate, truthful knowledge about the life and, ultimately, demise of a true American icon," said the Gotham Group's Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, who is to produce the film with Peter McHugh.

"Hotchner's stories hold a mythical value to those of us who so respect the author Hemingway but know little about the man."

Born in Chicago suburb Oak Park in 1899, Nobel prize winner Hemingway was renowned for his clipped, masculine literary style and depicted subjects as diverse as the first world war, bullfighting, the Spanish civil war and sport fishing in a career spanning five decades.

He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in July 1961, having attempted suicide earlier that year.