Collection: Ernest Hemingway collection | Archival Collections (original) (raw)

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The Ernest Hemingway Collection was purchased in the early 1970s from C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., and various other sources. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (1925-2001), a marketing executive, began amassing a Hemingway collection in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Clark sold the bulk of his Hemingway collection to the University of Maryland.

The Ernest Hemingway Collection contains serials, correspondence, manuscripts, scripts, proofs, and clippings. A large portion of the collection consists of serials that include stories and nonfiction written by and about Hemingway. It also includes some original correspondence to and from Hemingway. In addition, there are manuscripts and proofs of Hemingway's work and biographies of Hemingway. This collection also includes press releases, posters and other materials relating to movie adaptations of Hemingway's works. The collection spans the period from 1916 to 1977, with the majority of the materials falling between 1922 and 1961.

Dates

Use and Access to Collection

This collection is open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.

Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.

Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the reading room staff.

Extent

29.25 Linear Feet

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Scope and Content of Collection

The contents of the Ernest Hemingway Collection date from 1916 to 1977 and include materials that Hemingway created during his lifetime (1899-1961), materials about his life and his writings, and the creative output of others that was inspired by Hemingway. The materials include correspondence; manuscripts and drafts of published Hemingway literary works; serial publications with works by Hemingway; serial publications with works about Hemingway, both as a writer and as an individual; some personal effects; newspaper and magazine clippings; drafts of Hemingway biographies; manuscripts written by other individuals; publicity and scripts for the movies based on his novels; audio recordings; ephemera; artwork; and photographs.

Biographical / Historical

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961), was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the second child of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway. He attended the local public school and began to write in high school, submitting stories to the school newspaper, Tabula. His summers were spent with his family hunting, fishing, and camping in the woods around Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. On graduation from high school in 1917 and impatient for more excitement, he did not enter college as reported in the school yearbook, Senior Tabula, but went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. He was rejected for military service because of poor vision, but he still managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, just shy of turning nineteen years old, he was injured by an explosion on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. While recovering at a hospital in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, whom he asked to marry him. She declined the offer. These were experiences he was never to forget.

Hemingway returned home to recuperate and continue writing. For a while he worked at odd jobs in Chicago including as staff writer of the Toronto Star. On September 3, 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson and soon afterwards they moved to France where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Splitting their time between Paris and Toronto, it was in the latter city that the first of his three sons, John, was born on October 10, 1923. While in Paris he met other American writers, in particular F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, who all encouraged his writing. He began to see his non-journalistic work appear in print there, and in 1924 his first book, In Our Time, a collection of stories, was published in Paris and subsequently released in New York City in 1925. 1926 saw the publication of The Sun Also Rises, a novel about a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the postwar "Lost Generation." Hemingway and Hadley Richardson divorced in 1927, and he soon married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. It was at this time that Hemingway converted to Catholicism.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. He demonstrated his mastery of short fiction with Men without Women, published in 1927, and further enhanced it with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. In 1928, Pauline gave birth to Hemingway's second son Patrick, and they moved to Key West, Florida, to begin their life together. However, shortly afterward, their life was disturbed by the suicide of Hemingway's father, Clarence.

The novel A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929. Recalling Hemingway's experiences as a young soldier in Italy, the novel combines a love story with a war story. Hemingway's third son Gregory was born in 1931. That same year the Hemingways purchased a home in Key West, where he wrote the majority of his later novels.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting produced Death in the Afternoon in 1932. The Green Hills of Africa, written in 1935, resulted from a safari he took in the fall of 1933 to the big-game regions of Kenya and Tanzania. In 1937, he published a minor novel, To Have and Have Not, about a Caribbean desperado, set in Key West during the Great Depression.

In 1937, Hemingway made four trips to Spain, once more as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, to report on the civil war. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in a besieged Madrid. Hemingway divorced Pauline in 1940. A few weeks after the divorce, he married Collier's war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. That same year he published the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which tells the story of an American volunteer fighting for the Republicans in Spain. After the completion of the novel, he and Martha travelled to cover another war, the Japanese invasion of China.

All of his life, Hemingway was fascinated by war, and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris although he was ostensibly a journalist. Following the war in Europe and newly divorced from Gellhorn, Hemingway married Mary Welsh, who had covered World War II with distinction for Time and Life. The couple settled at Finca Vigía ("Lookout Farm"), Hemingway's estate outside Havana, Cuba, and Hemingway began writing seriously again. Across the River and into the Trees, released in 1950, was not a critical success, but Hemingway was soon to receive the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, a short novel about an old Cuban fisherman, published in 1952. This book played a role in gaining Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

He continued to travel widely, and, on a trip to Africa in 1954, he was so badly injured in two successive plane crashes that some American newspapers mistakenly published his obituary, believing he had been killed. By 1960, Fidel Castro's revolution had driven most Americans from Cuba. Hemingway, who remained cordial with Castro, moved to Ketchum, Idaho, intending to return to Cuba and continue to work as before. While in Idaho he worked on both The Dangerous Summer and A Moveable Feast. Poor health and depression resulted in two hospitalizations at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. These treatments proved ineffective, and after his return to the house in Ketchum in the summer of 1961, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Hemingway left behind a substantial number of manuscripts, many of which were retrieved by Mary Hemingway from their home in Cuba. Some of these have been published posthumously. A Moveable Feast was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas, appeared in 1970.

Arrangement

This collection is divided into seven series.

Series 1

Correspondence

Series 2

Writings

Series 3

Serials

Series 4

Clippings

Series 5

Galley Proofs, Manuscripts, and Scripts

Series 6

Printed Matter

Series 7

Art Work, Photographs, Audio Recordings, and Ephemera

Custodial History and Acquisition Information

This collection was created though numerous purchases by the University of Maryland Libraries in the early 1970s. The bulk of the collection was acquired from C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., circa 1974. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (1925-2001), a marketing executive, was the leading collector of Nathaniel Hawthorne materials. Clark was born in Detroit to C. E. Frazer Clark, Sr., an educator, and Lucy Huffman Clark. During World War II, he served in the 87th Infantry Division and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After returning from service, Clark did his undergraduate work at Kenyon College and earned his M. A. in English at Wayne State University in 1956. Clark wrote his master's thesis on "Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Artist, A Self-Portrait." In 1962, Clark co-founded Bruccoli Clark Publishing with Matthew J. Bruccoli. The company was to become Bruccoli Clark Layman (BCL) with the addition of Richard Layman in 1983. The firm produced reference works in literary and social history and published limited editions of literary works. By the late 1960s, Hawthorne material was becoming more scarce, and there was little left for Clark to acquire; therefore, he shifted his attention to Ernest Hemingway because it was still possible to purchase major Hemingway material. After several years collecting Hemingway, Clark sold the bulk of his collection to the University of Maryland in order to resume his work on Nathanial Hawthorne. In 1974, Clark co-founded, with David B. Kesterson, the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. He wrote the standard Hawthorne bibliography, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Descriptive Bibliography, published in 1978.

Separated Material

Originally among the contents of the University of Maryland Libraries' Hemingway Collection were copies of the serial publications This Quarter (1925-1932) and Transatlantic Review (1924), some of which included articles by Hemingway. These publications were transferred to the Libraries' Special Collections rare book holdings. An appendix lists these issues and indicates which contain work by Hemingway. Researchers can also search for the serials in the library catalog.

Processing Information

Paper clips, staples, and rubber bands were removed from the collection. When necessary, folded paper was flattened. Fragile documents were placed in mylar sleeves to prevent damage from handling. Some brittle newspaper clippings were photocopied and placed with the originals, but those clippings that were in particularly poor condition were removed from the collection. Duplicate clippings and serials were discarded. (A list of items removed from the collection is available.) Oversized serial publications were placed into appropriately sized boxes. This is noted next to the folder description and an empty folder with a reference to the oversize box number was placed in the correct order within the series. Items in this collection were purchased individually or in groups over the course of a period of years. The collection was assembled from three separate accessions as well as from two other collections. If there ever had been an order imposed upon them before purchase, it could not be determined. The final arrangement of the collection was created during processing.

Administrative Information

Title

Guide to the Ernest Hemingway collection

Status

Completed

Author

Processed by Lara D'Agaro.

Date

2008-10-15

Description rules

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Language of description

English

Script of description

Code for undetermined script

Language of description note

Finding aid written in English.

Library Details

Library Details

Part of the Special Collections and University Archives