Display opens window on Hemingway’s world
BOSTON — A new Ernest Hemingway exhibition puts a fresh spin on the author’s colourful life and legacy by displaying his own books and belongings alongside pop-culture items from his time.
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Inspired opened on Thursday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, which has become the leading research centre for Hemingway studies.
Visitors to the expanded show will see manuscripts for A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and other Hemingway works — but they’ll also glimpse popular paperback books from the first half of the 20th century, as well as magazines, photographs and other mementoes pulled from his world. It’s an attempt to portray Hemingway in his proper context.
“It is now our pleasure to present a permanent Ernest Hemingway exhibit that tells the writer’s story by weaving together his literary masterpieces with his worldly inspirations,” said James Roth, the JFK Library’s deputy director.
“The exhibit places the viewer in Hemingway’s shoes, seeing the people and places that inspired his greatest works.”
It includes many of the papers, photos, fishing rods, mounted animal trophies and other personal belongings that Hemingway’s widow, Mary, retrieved from the author’s former estate in Cuba, with help from JFK, after her husband died in 1961. She later offered a trove of items to Jacqueline Kennedy for safekeeping and display at the Boston library, which opened in 1979.
It has since become the world’s leading repository of Hemingway lore.
Hemingway and Kennedy never met, but the late president was an admirer. Kennedy wrote to Hemingway for permission to use his phrase “grace under pressure” in the opening to Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.
The new permanent display builds and expands on a 2016 temporary, but ambitious, exhibition, Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars. Curated by Hilary Justice, the presidential library’s Hemingway expert, the latest presentation draws from virtually every aspect of JFK’s vast Hemingway collection.