Special Collections Department

Ernest Hemingway Manuscripts

ca. 1930s

Manuscript Collection Number: 268
Accessioned: Purchase, 1991
Extent: 1 box
Content: Manuscripts.
Access: The collection is open for research.
Processed: May 1993 by Lianne S. Cantelmi.

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Biographical Note
Scope and Contents Note
Contents List

Biographical Note

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American journalist, novelist, and short story writer. After work as a journalist in the United States and service as an ambulance driver in Italy, Hemingway settled in Paris in the 1920s, where he became associated with a group of expatriate American writers including Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He attracted attention as a fiction writer with the publication of two volumes of short stories, In Our Time (1925) and The Torrents of Spring (1926). By the late 1930s, his reputation was well established by the success of his novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and his non-fiction works Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). He returned to Spain in 1937 as a reporter and became deeply involved in the pro-loyalist cause. During the next few years a new concern with social problems was reflected in his work, which included the Depression-era novel To Have and Have Not (1937); a play, The Fifth Column (1938); and the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway's productivity declined during the 1940s, but his career revived dramatically in the 1950s with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Scope and Content Note

The Ernest Hemingway Manuscripts is a collection of typescript and carbon typescript drafts of six of Ernest Hemingway's literary works: "A Clean Well Lighted Place," "Fathers and Sons," The Fifth Column, "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen," "Green Hills of Africa", and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The manuscripts in this collection formerly belonged to T. Otto Bruce, known as Toby, who served as Hemingway's chauffeur and companion. Bruce obtained the manuscripts from Hemingway's widow, Mary, when she was sorting out Hemingway's papers at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Florida.

This collection of manuscripts complements existing Hemingway materials in Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, including the Louis Henry and Marguerite Cohn Hemingway Collection (MS 100), the Ernest Hemingway Collection (MS269), and the extensive collection of books in the Louis Henry and Marguerite Cohn Hemingway Collection, which is cataloged for the Special Collections printed materials collections.

Related collections:

MS 100 Louis Henry and Marguerite Cohn Hemingway Collection
MS 269 Ernest Hemingway Collection

Contents List

Box -- Folder -- Contents

                                    
F1   "A clean well-lighted place" [story], n.d.
     Ts, ts [carbon], 10pp.  
     Consists of two drafts each 5pp.  Ribbon copy includes two carbon pages [2-3].  Second
     draft is Ts [carbon].  Additional blank sheet also included.

F2   [Untitled story], n.d.
     Ts [carbon], 9 pp., numbered 3-11, lacking pp. 1-2.  
     Bears minor autograph and ts. corrections.  Published under the title "Fathers and Sons."

F3   A play [play], 1937
     Ts [carbon], 85pp.
     "Madrid Nov. 23 1937" typed at the end of the last page.
     Subsequently published under the title "The Fifth Column."

F4   "God rest you merry gentlemen" [story], n.d.
     Ts [carbon], 5pp.  
     Bears minor autograph corrections.

F5   ["Green hills of Africa"] [story], n.d.
     Ts. [carbon], 84pp., numbered 49-131, with additional p. 113A inserted.  
     Bears a number of autograph corrections and insertions.  This partial 
     typescript is the companion piece to a draft held by the John F. Kennedy 
     Library.

F6   "The happy ending"[story], n.d.
     Ts [carbon], 28pp.  
     Subsequently published under the title "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

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