‘Hidden Hemingway’ Reveals More About the Literary Legend

Clarence E. Hemingway family, Oak Park, Illinois, ca. 1917.
This photograph of the Clarence E. Hemingway family (Oak Park, Illinois, ca. 1917) is part of the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. From left to right: Dr. C. E. Hemingway, Carol, Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest, Leicester, Ursula, Sunny, Marcelline. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/via Wikimedia Commons
Clarence E. Hemingway family, Oak Park, Illinois, ca. 1917.
This photograph of the Clarence E. Hemingway family (Oak Park, Illinois, ca. 1917) is part of the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. From left to right: Dr. C. E. Hemingway, Carol, Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest, Leicester, Ursula, Sunny, Marcelline. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/via Wikimedia Commons

‘Hidden Hemingway’ Reveals More About the Literary Legend

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Ernest Hemingway is one of the most recognized American novelists of the 20th century. His books like The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea are on high school and college syllabi, and his terse writing style has been copied, imitated and even parodied. 

But beyond his roots in Oak Park, a few war stories and tales of his time in Key West, how much do you really know about Ernest Hemingway the man?

In his new book Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park, Robert Elder and his co-authors reveal some of the lesser-known stories and history about Hemingway cobbled together from items in his archives like family photos, teenage diaries, bullfighting tickets love letters and 100-year-old musical compositions from his mother Grace Hall Hemingway.