Cuba makes Hemingway trove available to US

Cuba makes Hemingway trove available to US

Havana (AFP) - Cuba has released to US researchers copies of more than
2,000 documents related to Ernest Hemingway, media reported Tuesday in
Havana, the American literary giant's home during the 1940s and 1950s.

"More than 2,000 documents held at the Finca Vigia Museum in Havana are
now available for the first time for researchers in the United States
after having been digitized and sent to the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum," the Cuba Contemporanea magazine wrote on its website.

Now a museum, Finca Vigia, which means "lookout house" is located in the
town of San Francisco de Paula just outside Havana. It was Hemingway's
home during much of his more than two-decade-long residence in Cuba.

Among the treasures now accessible to US scholars at the Kennedy Library
in Boston is the 1954 telegram from the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden
informing Hemingway that he had just been awarded its prestigious
literature prize.

A statement from the Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts said that
the trove of documents, which had never seen outside of Cuba, includes
letters, passports, telegrams, household accounts, bar bills and recipes.

"We are pleased to make available to researchers copies of these
materials that provide a unique glimpse into the everyday life of Ernest
Hemingway," said Tom Putnam, Director of the Kennedy Library.

"For a literary figure who is often portrayed as larger than life, this
trove of personal ephemera serves to humanize the man and to understand
the writer."

Officials said it is the second large document release from the Finca
Vigia. A first huge tranche of 3,000 digitized images was donated to the
Kennedy Library in 2008.

Hemingway, who took his own life in 1961 at the age of 61 after
returning to the United States, wrote some of his most famous works in
Cuba, including "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and "The Old Man and the Sea."

He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of
the art of narrative... and for the influence that he has exerted on
contemporary style."

Source: Cuba makes Hemingway trove available to US - Yahoo News -
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