True at First Light - Publication History

Publication History

The ownership of Hemingway's manuscripts is complicated. Two books have been published from the African book manuscript: True at First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway, and Under Kilimanjaro, edited by scholars Robert Lewis and Robert Fleming. In 1965 Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation, and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. A group of Hemingway scholars met in 1980 to assess the donated papers when they formed the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship". After Mary Hemingway's 1986 death, Hemingway's sons John and Patrick asked the Hemingway Society to take on the duties of the Hemingway Foundation; in 1997 the Hemingway Estate and the Hemingway Society/Foundation agreed to a two-part publishing plan for the African book. An abridged trade publication of True at First Light was to be published in 1999, to be edited by Patrick Hemingway; the Hemingway Foundation would then oversee the reworking of the entire text, to be published as Under Kilimanjaro. Of Under Kilimanjaro, the editors claim "this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement".

In the early 1970s, portions of the manuscript had been serialized in Sports Illustrated and anthologized. Mary Hemingway approved the segments published by Sports Illustrated: segments described by Patrick Hemingway as a "straight account of a shooting safari". In a 1999 talk presented at the annual Oak Park Hemingway Society dinner, Patrick Hemingway admitted ownership of Ernest Hemingway's manuscripts had "a rather tortuous history". Access to the Africa manuscript—and to other Hemingway material—required a lawsuit and an eventual agreement with the Hemingway Society.

Scribner's requested a book of fewer than 100,000 words. Patrick Hemingway worked for two years with the 200,000-word manuscript—initially converting to an electronic format, and then editing out superfluous material. He strengthened the storyline, and eliminated long descriptive passages with disparaging remarks about family members and living persons. He explains the manuscript was a draft lacking "ordinary housekeeping chores" such as character names. The cuts made, he said, maintained the integrity of the story and "the reader is not deprived of the essential quality of the book".

True at First Light was published on July 7, 1999 with a print run of 200,000. For the publicity campaign, Patrick Hemingway appeared on the Today Show on the day of publication. The book became the main selection for the Book of the Month Club (BOMC), was serialized in the New Yorker, and rights were sold for translations to Danish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish. A sound recording was released in 2007.