Which Famous Writer Survived Two Plane Crashes in Less Than 48 Hours?

There’s bad luck, and then there’s what happened to Ernest Hemingway and his wife while traveling in East Africa in 1954.

Although some of the details have become muddled from successive retellings, what appears to have occurred is that in January 1954, the famed American writer and his fourth wife, journalist Mary Welsh, were in a Cessna on a sightseeing tour, destined for Uganda's beautiful and inaccessible Murchison Falls. Their plane crashed after the pilot swerved to avoid a flock of birds and instead struck a utility pole, leaving Hemingway with a shoulder injury and Welsh with two broken ribs. The pilot, Hemingway, and Welsh camped along the Nile, where they were picked up in the morning by a passing tourist boat.

In a matter of hours, they boarded another plane, planning to seek medical care in Entebbe, but it crashed soon after takeoff and caught fire on the airstrip. Although the pilot and Welsh were able to escape through a window, Hemingway was too large to fit and ended up using his head to force the plane’s door open. Unsurprisingly, he was left with numerous injuries, including burns, a concussion, a skull fracture, crushed vertebrae, and ruptured internal organs. Eventually, they reached Entebbe by car. Hemingway would spend several months recuperating in Venice, where he had the bizarre experience of reading his own obituary; several newspapers had reported that Hemingway and Welsh had died.

Although Hemingway appeared jovial and upbeat when interviewed by reporters in Entebbe, the head injuries from the second crash, coupled with the many concussions he had suffered earlier in his life, took a massive toll on the writer’s health.

For whom the bell tolls: