Ernest Hemingway's grandchildren are embroiled in a courtroom dispute over his late son's $7.5-million (U.S.) estate amid claims that he remarried after undergoing sex-change surgery.

But along with those family traits came a legacy of family trauma. Ernest Hemingway, the hard-drinking, Nobel Prize-winning writer shot himself just months before Mariel was born in 1961.

Ernest Hemingway in 1932 on the front porch of his in-laws’ home in Piggott. To the far right are Paul and Mary Pfeiffer, parents of Pauline Pfeiffer, to whom Hemingway was married from ...