The granite monument with the bronze Hemingway head was erected by his family in 1966. The famous author spent many summers in Ketchum/Sun Valley, moved there permanently in 1959, and committed suicide in 1961. The memorial overlooks a golf course.
Ketchum/Sun Valley was Hemingway's summer home from the 1940s on. He bought a house on Big Wood River in 1959, and in 1961, the renowned author put a double-barreled shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The 1966 monument quotes a 1939 eulogy Hemingway wrote for a friend killed in a hunting mishap: "Best of all he loved the fall, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills, the high blue windless skies; Now he will be part of them forever."