The Ernest Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Library is the most comprehensive body of Hemingway material currently available in one place.  Research in these materials is essential to anyone who attempts a definitive study of Hemingway and his writing.

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 the inauguration in 1960. Hemingway was among the American artists, writers, and musicians invited to attend the inauguration. A draft of the cable which Hemingway sent to President Kennedy from the Mayo Clinic shows Hemingway's admiration for the President:

Watching the inauguration from Rochester there was happiness and the hope and the pride and how beautiful we thought Mrs. Kennedy was. Watching on the screen I was sure our President could stand any of the heat to come as he had taken the cold of that day. Each day since I have renewed my faith and tried to understand the practical difficulties of governing he must face as they arrive and admire the true courage he brings as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world.

President Kennedy more than once expressed his reciprocal admiration for Hemingway. He had Hemingway's definition of courage in mind while writing his own Profiles in Courage. In a statement released by the White House when Hemingway died, Kennedy noted:

Few Americans have had a greater impact on the emotions and attitudes of the American people than Ernest Hemingway.... He almost singlehandedly transformed the literature and the ways of thought of men and women in every country in the world.

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three previous Nobel Prize winners, Sinclair Lewis, George C. Marshall, and Hemingway--the opening pages from the then-unpublished Islands in the Stream.

At the dedication of the Hemingway Room on July 18, 1980, celebrants experienced the excitement of the Kennedy White House cultural events. Director of the Library, Dan H. Fenn, addressed the guests: "Tonight we unite art and politics under one roof as a tangible and permanent reminder of President Kennedy's conviction that neither is whole and true without the other."

The Hemingway Room is a comfortable, "library-like" research room for students of Hemingway. Architect I.M. Pei built the room into the Kennedy Library's archives tower, with a large picture window overlooking the islands of Boston Harbor. The small, unconventional space, used to utmost advantage, provides 3,000 linear feet of shelf space. There are open shelves for books and archives boxes of papers; locked glass cases for showing and storing memorabilia; a closet for wide, flat items; two generous researcher tables; an attendant's desk; animal trophies on the walls; and armchairs by a fireplace. In spite of its small space--only 500 square feet--and its use for storing reference materials, the room is one of the most attractive and functional in the Library.

Although the setting is impressive, it is of course the collection itself that draws attention from literary scholars. 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. 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."

The Hemingway Research Room's mission is to serve first researchers, then educational groups and the general public.  The room is not open for general interest or browsing but rather for researchers who require the use of the library's unique manuscript, audiovisual, and documentary holdings related to Ernest Hemingway.