Winter Chautauqua - February 5 - 8, 2026

Ernest Hemingway portrayed by John Dennis Anderson

A novelist, journalist and short story writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) revolutionized all three literary forms with his abbreviated style, earning him the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. His adventurous life was as rebellious and noteworthy as his writings, making him a celebrity as famous for his exploits as for his writing. It was a life of warring, bull fighting, woman chasing, drinking, big-game hunting and fishing that was romanticized during his lifetime as well as now. A member of the post-war Lost Generation, he married four times and witnessed and wrote about both world wars and the Spanish Civil War. Obsessed with death and living with grace under pressure, Hemingway died by his own hand at age 61. 

John Dennis Anderson, a native of Waco, Texas now living on Cape Cod, is a performance studies scholar and Professor Emeritus in Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston. With degrees from Baylor University and the University of Texas at Austin, concentrated in the study of literature through performance, he is the author of The Student Companion to William Faulkner (Greenwood, 2007). Anderson has received numerous grants to develop Chautauqua performances and performs widely as the authors Henry James, William Faulkner, Washington Irving, Lynn Riggs, Robert Frost, Henry Beston, Louis Bromfield, Ernest Hemingway, Marshall McLuhan and Christopher Isherwood. He was a faculty member for Humanities North Dakota’s Chautauqua Training Institute. He received the 2013 Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance and the 2019 Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, both from the National Communication Association. His website is jdanderson.org.