John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum - The Ernest Hemingway Collection

The Ernest Hemingway Collection

The library is also home to a collection of documents and belongings from Ernest Hemingway. The collection was established in 1968 following an exchange of letters between Hemingway's widow Mary and Jacqueline Kennedy that confirmed that Hemingway's papers would be archived there. In 1961, despite a U.S. travel ban to Cuba, President Kennedy had arranged to allow Mary Hemingway to go there to claim her recently deceased husband's documents and belongings. A room for the collection was dedicated on July 18, 1980 by Patrick Hemingway and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The Ernest Hemingway Collection spans Hemingway's career, and includes "ninety percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, making the Kennedy Library the world's principal center for research" on his life and work. It includes:.

• over 1000 manuscripts of varying lengths, including hand-written drafts of The Sun Also Rises and dozens of hand-drafted alternate endings to A Farewell to Arms;
• research material on bullfighting, used as background for Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer;
• thousands of letters written by or to Hemingway; this included correspondence with fellow writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Carlos Baker, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Martha Gellhorn, A. E. Hotchner, James Joyce, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as with actress Marlene Dietrich, restauranteur Toots Shor, Cardinal Francis Spellman, publisher Charles Scribner, his editor Maxwell Perkins, and his lawyer Alfred Rice;
• more than 10,000 photographs, as well as press clippings and other ephemera; and
• books from his private library, many with marginalia, and including a rare copy of Francisco Goya's Los Proverbios.