Dree the latest Hemingway to model topless

The 21-year-old great-granddaughter of the legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway has admitted she has read few of his novels and prefers the writing of his longtime friend, the author F Scott Fitzgerald.

Dree Hemingway, a New York model whose mother is the actress Mariel Hemingway, has posed topless in a series of moody black and white photographs for the US glossy magazine V.

Ernest Hemingway's books include For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. But in an interview accompanying the V photoshoot, Dree claims she wants to build a reputation for herself without trading on her famous family name.

"Ernest is not someone I'm constantly thinking about," said Dree. "In fact I might like his friend F Scott Fitzgerald a little more. Right now, I'm more in a Gatsby phase. I will say though that Ernest had a great look, that scruffy beer [sic] look. I'm into that. A little scruff goes a long way."

Dree's mother Mariel also posed topless, for Playboy in 1982, to publicise the film Star 80 in which she played Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy model murdered by her estranged husband. But Mariel's most famous role remains her first - that of Woody Allen's high-school lover in Manhattan (1979).

Dree, who trained as a ballet dancer, is a full-time model and appeared on the catwalk during New York fashion week in September. In this respect, she is following in the footsteps of her aunt, Mariel's sister Margaux Hemingway, who was one of the top fashion models of the 1970s. She eventually committed suicide in 1996 aged 41.

Margaux also said she had read few of Ernest Hemingway's books, but that was because she suffered from dyslexia. "I am not a Hemingway aficionado," she admitted.