No, it’s not my father’s birthday–it’s Papa Hemingway’s!

Hem and his cat.

There are a lot of old interviews with him floating around the internet–one from The Paris Review has this gem:

HEMINGWAY [asked about the amount of revising he does]: It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER : Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right.

Amen, brother.