If you share a last name with the most famous alcoholic in American literature, people are going to have questions.
Elijah Hemingway, a 29-year-old graphic designer from Boise, has spent his entire adult life fielding the same three: Are you related?
Can you get me into the house in Key West?
The answers, in order, are "sort of," "no," and "my liver would like a word." Elijah is what genealogy nerds call a collateral descendant — his great-great-grandfather was Ernest's uncle, which makes him roughly as related to the literary legend as your cousin's roommate is to you.
He once got rejected from a creative writing MFA because, and he quotes the email, "the committee felt the surname might overshadow the work." Sir, that is not the flex you think it is.
His TikTok account, which blew up last spring after he posted a deadpan tour of "things people assume I own," now sits at 400,000 followers.
No beard that smells of absinthe and regret.
What he does own is a cat named Fitzgerald, which he insists is a coincidence and everyone insists is not.
The internet, being the internet, has decided he is either a literary heir or a con artist.
Reddit threads have accused him of "name-farming," which sounds like something you'd do on a farm but is apparently a real accusation.
Elijah's response, posted to X: "If I were farming this name I'd have picked a better crop.
Have you tried monetizing a dead guy's mustache?
It's brutal out here." AITA-style drama erupted last month when he declined to speak at a Hemingway festival in Michigan.
Commenters called him ungrateful, a phony, and — my personal favorite — "a gatekeeper of a gate he doesn't own." He fired back in a video: "I'm not the gatekeeper.
I'm the guy standing next to the gate saying 'please stop asking me about the gate.'" Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: Elijah actually writes.
He's published two in small lit mags under a pen name, because the second he uses his real one, every editor suddenly wants a "Hemingway-esque" piece about war and whiskey.
He writes about his divorce and his Honda Civic.
That's the part that really grinds America's gears.
We love a dynasty until we meet a guy who's technically in one and still can't afford a house.
He once Venmo-requested a friend $4 for a coffee and got screenshot-shamed for "betraying the family fortune." There is no family fortune.
There's a Wikipedia page and a lot of tourists.
What he wants, he says, is simple: to be judged on his own mediocre decisions like everyone else.
Not the decisions of a man who died in 1961 and never met him.
He's tired of the "write drunk, edit sober" quotes in his mentions.
He's tired of being a walking trivia answer.
So if you see Elijah Hemingway at a bar, buy him a drink.
He's so, so heard it. **The Take:** We built a whole culture around worshipping bloodlines, then act shocked when the guy at the end of one just wants to file his taxes in peace.
Elijah didn't ask to be a footnote to a mustache.
Final Thoughts
The least we can do is let him have it — and maybe stop emailing him about the six-toed cats.