When the United States declared war on Germany and Japan in 1941, Ernest Hemingway did not immediately travel to Europe as a journalist, as he had for the Spanish Civil War. Instead, he stuck around Havana, where he drank (Scotch and sodas, daiquiris) and went fishing. In a grandiose and ultimately ineffectual manner, he also devoted time to the Allied cause, hunting enemy submarines in a wooden fishing boat called the Pilar.

Hemingway’s biographers have largely ignored this period in his life. Kenneth S. Lynn, for instance, devotes just two pages to the U-boat gambit in his nearly six-hundred-page