Features

Experts Available for Interviews on Hemingway's Cuba Papers

First Milestone for Ambitious Hemingway Restoration Project

Beginning this month, scholars and the public will have access to more than 3,000 papers left behind at Hemingway's Cuban estate, marking a major milestone in the SSRC-led project to restore the writer Ernest Hemingway's Cuba legacy. They include such treasures as an unpublished epilogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea, and countless letters and ephemera that reveal the writer's colorful daily life on the island.

Scholars, researchers and others can apply to the Cuban authorities for permission to view documents on site. Later this spring, the documents will also be available at the Hemingway Collection in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. With over 90 percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, the Library is the principal center for research on Hemingway's life and work.

Hemingway's Cuba papers were discovered in a deteriorated state in Finca Vigía, the villa outside Havana where the Nobel Prize-winning author made his home from 1939 until 1960. The Social Science Research Council brokered an agreement in 2002 to allow U.S. experts to assist their Cuban counterparts with restoring the documents and converting them into microfilm. The project was delayed several times by the American embargo and a lack of funding, and funds are still being sought for restoring the writer's photographs and scrapbooks.

For more information, go to: "Bell Tolls for Hemingway Papers, and SSRC Answers"

Published on: Thursday, January 08, 2009