The Ernest Hemingway Collection is the generous gift of Mary Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's widow, to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and to Hemingway scholars and readers around the world. The collection spans Hemingway's entire career, and contains ninety percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, making the Kennedy Library the world's principal center for research on the life and work of this author.
Collection Highlights
- More than 1000 manuscript items, ranging from one-line fragments to thousand-page manuscripts
- More than 10,000 photographs
- Hemingway's first hand-written draft of The Sun Also Rises
- Forty four different hand-written drafts for the ending to A Farewell to Arms
- Family scrapbooks, including one compiled by the writer's grandparents that chronicles Hemingway's life from his birth in 1899 through his teens
- Hemingway's leather briefcase with stamps revealing where and how he traveled
- Hemingway's personal collection of bullfighting material which he drew on as background when writing Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer
- One of the most extensive of the existing logs of Pilar, Hemingway's fishing boat; several thousand letters written by or to Hemingway, including correspondence with Sherwood Anderson, Carlos Baker, Marlene Dietrich, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Martha Gellhorn, A. E. Hotchner, James Joyce, Archibald MacLeish, Maxwell Perkins, Ezra Pound, Alfred Rice, Charles Scribner, Toots Shor, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and Gertrude Stein
- Books from Hemingway's private library, many with the writer's handwritten notes in the margins, including such rare volumes as Francisco Goya's Los Proverbios - a volume found in only two or three other U.S. libraries; a signed copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos by Ezra Pound; a press copy of James Joyce's Ulysses signed by Hemingway; and Portrait of Mabel Dodge by Gertrude Stein
- The works of several early 20th century painters owned by Hemingway including four paintings by Andre Masson and a painting of Hemingway by his friend Waldo Peirce, who entitled the portrait "Kid Balzac"
- Hemingway's personal collection of press clippings and ephemera