Ernest Hemingway Administrative History (#104)

Administrative History

In 1968, with a simple exchange of letters, Mary Hemingway and Jacqueline Kennedy arranged for Ernest Hemingway's papers to be donated to the Kennedy Library. Their husbands never met, but had Hemingway's health been better they would have, at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1960.

During the Kennedy administration, Mary Hemingway was permitted to return to Castro's Cuba to remove some of her husband's papers from their abandoned home, the Finca Vigia, in Havana. Kennedy honored Hemingway at the White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners in April, 1962. Following this dinner Frederic March read excerpts from the works of three previous Nobel Prize winners, Sinclair Lewis, George C. Marshall, and Hemingway--the opening pages from the then-unpublished Islands in the Stream .

Mary Hemingway started depositing papers in the Library in 1972. The first materials to arrive were two boxes of miscellaneous and fragmentary manuscripts. From that point until 1980, papers continued to arrive at the Library. There were materials from Mary Hemingway's New York apartment, from her home in Ketchum, from Harvard's Houghton Library, and from Carlos Baker in Princeton. The bulk of the collection, however, came from two sources: Mary Hemingway's bank vault in New York (the contents of which Charles Mann and Philip Young listed in their inventory), and from warehouse storage in New York.

After Mary Hemingway's death in November 1986, there were still some papers in her apartment in New York City.  Kennedy Library staff went to the apartment in May 1987 and selected a total of 32 cubic feet of material which included papers, books, and memorabilia. In February 1989, staff went to New York City and picked up from Jerold Couture, lawyer of the late Alfred Rice, an additional 2 manilla envelopes of Hemingway documents, which had been kept in a bank vault in New York. Alfred Rice was Mary Hemingway's lawyer and executor.

The papers arrived in boxes, trunks, filing cabinets, and shopping bags. For the most part they were not organized, and first they were sorted by type: manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, publications, and "other." All manuscript materials were deacidified at the New England Document Conservation Center, and then they were repaired, separated, cleaned, and mylar encapsulated as necessary. Intensive preservation work was performed on five very fragile scrapbooks, kept by Grace Hall Hemingway from her son Ernest's birth until he was eighteen years of age. Newspaper clipping scrapbooks were taken apart and the clippings deacidified and encapsulated. Copy negatives were made of over 10,000 still photographs. All materials were placed in acid-free containers. A "Save America's Treasures" grant awarded in 2004 initiated a new preservation effort.  Preservation in the collection is ongoing.

The manuscripts of Hemingway's published novels and short stories were first of the papers to be identified, arranged and described.  In the collection, there is at least one form of each of his novels (e.g. a draft, gypescript, galley and/or notes).  Some writings are as large as the 1146 page manuscript/typescript of For WHom the Bell Tolls, while others are as short as one page of possible titles for In Our Time.

The manuscripts were opened in January 1975, after which work began on the photograph collection and story framents (short stories, articles, poems and unpublished works).  Work also continued on correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, which includes over 1100 letters written by Hemingway.

Most of the materials acquired in 1987 were Mary Hemingway's personal papers and have been processed and opened as a separate collection ( Mary W. Hemingway Collection #105 ). Ernest Hemingway documents were identified and removed from this material and are described in the finding aid.

As each part of the collection was arranged and described, it was copied and opened for research use. Researchers are permitted to use only copies of the papers in their work. Researchers can browse freely among the copies, and this protects the originals from wear and tear.

The collection will grow in the future as additional material is donated and as restrictions are removed from material not at present open to research (some unpublished manuscript material and some family and legal correspondence). As new material becomes available, infomation will be added to the online finding aid on the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website.

Several deliberate omissions were made in the description process. It was decided not to include size of paper and watermark descriptions, because the item descriptions would then be too complex. Those interested in the physical appearance of the papers would probably not be satisfied with secondhand descriptions and would prefer to see the originals.

It was decided not to date the manuscripts, and this is left to the scholar's judgment and discernment.

It was decided not to note whether manuscripts were published or not. Researchers are referred to the bibliography of Hemingway's works by Audre Hanneman (Princeton University Press, 1967 and 1974).

It was decided not to research bibliographic information not recorded on newsclippings.

Please be encouraged to inform the Curator of any errors or appropriate additions for this guide you may discover while working with the papers. They will be considered, and, if appropriate, added to the finding aid.