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.

 

One of the most important items is Hemingway’s original manuscript for “A Farewell to Arms”. This novel is considered one of his masterpieces and provides deep insight into his writing process and literary genius.

 

The 5th floor of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where the Ernest Hemingway Collection is housed, is generally not open to the public for browsing. However, researchers and scholars can access the collection by making an appointment with the library’s research room. This allows them to view and study the materials under supervised conditions.

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.

• Books from Hemingway’s private library, many with the writer’s handwritten notes in the margins.

• The works of several early 20th century painters owned by Hemingway.

• Hemingway’s personal collection of press clippings and ephemera