You can sense the petty jealousy seething between the lines of this piece.
At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety—or so one would have thought—and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?
Two things we can say about Hemingway - he wrote fairly prolifically from his teens until the end of his life, although some of his later work was only published posthumously; and his life was eventful, filled with first hand experiences of primal human activities like war and hunting and physical suffering and philandering, excellent fuel for a writer, fuel that most writers simply lack. It's not hard to 'account' for the legend of Hemingway, between his actual life and the quality and influence of his works.