Citation:
Abstract:
Part I: Hemingway's enduring intimacy
I am a scientist, an author, occasionally a journalist, and an editor of science and factual media. I'm not a literary scholar, but I have read all of Hemingway's published works and spent many days with his personal writings and photos preserved in the Hemingway archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
Spelunking in the collection donated by Mary Welsh Hemingway was always one of my favorite personal diversions when in Boston. After making a reservation with a research librarian, I'd jump on the Red Line from Harvard to the JFK/UMass exit. That being sufficient "T" time, I would take a taxi back to my room at the Harvard Club in Back Bay or to the house I rented in Cambridge, just off campus on Kirkland Place.
It would be hard to mistake the Hemingway room, adorned as it is with a mounted antelope head from his 1933 safari, a lion-skin rug, and his portrait.
My explorations in the Hemingway collection were admittedly cursory. l followed my own interests and requested material related to Hemingway's coverage of the Spanish Civil War and WWII. I confess to an almost promiscuous voyeurism in viewing rarely seen writings and photos of someone whom I felt I already knew intimately. Great writers have the ability to span time, distance, and differences to make their readers intimate companions.
Six decades after his death, Hemingway still has legions of us who think we know him. We think we understand him, and we envy and try to emulate his life, his writing, or both. (download to read more)