By Micah Friez
Published 7:00 am on March 14, 2025
When Mary Welsh’s birthday arrived in early April, she bravely embarked on her annual childhood tradition: the first swim of the year in Lake Bemidji.
“Usually the winter’s ice had retreated only a yard or two from the beach at Diamond Point, but there was enough open water for swimming 15 or 20 strokes, and whoever accompanied me came out of the water pink and giggling,” she later wrote in her autobiography.
During Welsh’s childhood, and not far from that park, what’s now Bemidji State University rose up along that same shoreline. After graduating from Bemidji High School in 1926, she enrolled at Bemidji State Teachers College.
Welsh’s time at BSTC set the stage for her adult life as a pioneering female journalist and World War II correspondent — and eventually the wife of premier American novelist Ernest Hemingway. The two wed on this date, March 14, in 1946.
“Mary Welsh, former resident of Bemidji and BTSC student, is honeymooning with author Ernest aboard his yacht near Cuba,” the Northern Student newspaper reported shortly after the wedding. “Hemingway, 47, is Miss Welsh’s (third) hubby — the gentleman has three previous matrimonial ventures to his credit.”
The romance blossomed in war-torn London, where Welsh was a correspondent for the London Daily Express, the largest English language paper in the world. She later moved on to write for TIME and LIFE Magazines, and her work included coverage of the London Blitz, the Munich Agreement and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Welsh and Hemingway met in the spring of 1944 and were “sharing his quarters” at the Hotel Ritz despite both being otherwise married at the time. Scandalous as may be, the pair wed each other two years later and remained together until Hemingway’s death in 1961. Welsh never remarried and, upon her death in 1986 at the age of 78, was laid to rest beside Hemingway in their former home of Ketchum, Idaho.
Mary Welsh, the writer
Welsh was born in Walker in 1908, but her family moved to Bemidji before she started kindergarten. The family lived in “a big sunny clapboard house” at the southwest corner of Bemidji Avenue and 12th Street — a home that was later sold to Manfred Deputy, Bemidji State’s first president, and still stands today.
Inside, the Welsh family often played host to the editor of the Bemidji Pioneer. The adolescent Welsh found inspiration.
“Since my childhood, when the editor of the Bemidji Pioneer and his wife came to our house for dinner, I had known that I would like to work on a newspaper,” she wrote in her autobiography.
After graduating from Bemidji High School in 1926, Welsh enrolled at Bemidji State Teachers College. She spent a year on campus and excelled in English, but then she moved on to the University of Minnesota. After two years there, she entered the school of journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago.
She landed a job at the Chicago Daily News writing womens’ page stories. While on a vacation to London, she personally besieged Lord Beaverbrook — the British press owner and an apropos title to a former Beaver like Welsh — for a job at the Daily Express.
Welsh earned a position, then a reputation as “without a doubt the ablest female journalist in London,” according to her editor Walter Graebner, who was not one to “toss bouquets around,” so described TIME Magazine in 1942. Welsh wrote slice-of-life war stories from London, then later covered Royal Air Force and Allied Expeditionary Force units across the English Channel.
Future United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower was among those in Welsh’s social circle. She couldn’t be intimidated, she smoked Camels, she drank gin and she swore like a sailor, according to “Hemingway's Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway,” a biography written by Timothy Christian in 2022. The Fargo Daily Tribune once declared that Welsh lived the life of “a glamorous, globe-trotting war correspondent.”
In 1942, Welsh and Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News became the first women accredited as war correspondents by the U.S. Army. Around the same time, the first American troops began arriving in Britain. Welsh faithfully chronicled their experiences for avid readers back stateside.
After the war ended in Europe, Welsh intended to take a year off from her work. But she ultimately never returned to the job. After marrying Hemingway in 1946, the two resided in Cuba until relocating to Idaho when Fidel Castro’s revolution made their presence on the island too difficult.
Mary Hemingway, the wife
Despite the curtain closing on her journalism career, Welsh never stopped pursuing literature. She became Hemingway’s in-house editor and right-hand woman.
Welsh typed and read his material, corrected spelling and grammar and made plot suggestions. According to Christian, Hemingway came to rely on Welsh’s intelligence, and “when he saw goosebumps on her arms, he knew he had it right.” She steered him gently but wisely.
Early in the marriage, Welsh became pregnant and hoped to give birth to the daughter they both wanted. Tragically, the pregnancy ended when one of Welsh’s fallopian tubes ruptured, and she nearly died. “Relying on his experience as a (World War I) ambulance driver, Ernest saved her life after the surgeon had removed his gloves and given up on her,” Christian wrote.
Welsh and Hemingway still built a life that Welsh later penned was filled with affection and love, though also difficulties, particularly in those later years. Hemingway was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
After Hemingway died by suicide in 1961, Welsh became his literary executor and was key in publishing several of his novels posthumously, including “The Garden of Eden” and “Islands in the Stream.” She established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in the 1970s, she donated her husband’s papers to the John F. Kennedy Library.
Welsh wrote her own autobiography, titled “How It Was,” which was published in 1976. In her final years, she moved to Manhattan.
In 2015, the city of Bemidji declared April 5 as “Mary Welsh Hemingway Day,” with then-mayor Rita Albrecht stressing the importance of remembering and honoring local history. In 2016, Puposky’s Wild Rose Theater hosted Cate Belleveau’s play about the women in Hemingway’s life titled “Mary 4 Martha 3 – NO Footnotes.” The play also ran in Walker and New York City. Another staged reading of the play took place in 2024 at Bemidji’s Carnegie Library.
Welsh herself supposedly made a number of semi-secret trips back to Bemidji to visit a few select friends over the years. Her clandestine appearances were not noted publicly until after she had left, at which time the local newspaper would mention her having been in town.
She never forgot Bemidji, so it’s fitting that her hometown hasn’t forgotten about her either.
KEEP READING: