A few days after returning home to Ketchum, he shot himself in the head with his favourite shotgun aged 61. "In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file," wrote Hotchner, the author of 'Papa Hemingway'. "I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide," he said.