Uncover Hemingway's Secret Lives at a New Exhibition

Even more than 50 years after his death, Ernest Hemingway makes history. Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars at the Morgan Library & Museum marks the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to the tumultuous life of the writer. To achieve this feat, the Morgan collaborated closely with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, home to an expansive collection of Hemingway archives and artifacts. As a result, the show reveals seldom-seen sides of the celebrated man, from childhood photographs and wartime snapshots, to letters between the leading minds in Modernism, to precious editions of his greatest works.

Throughout the run of the show—up until January 31st, 2016—the library will also host an array of public programing. These include screenings of filmic adaptations of Hemingway’s stories (Don Siegel's 1964 The Killers shows Friday, November 20th); lectures from Hemingway scholars and experts; a concert from the Cygnus Ensemble featuring compositions relating to the writer and his band of creative expatriates in Paris (on December 8th); and finally, a discussion on the organization and development of the show by Declan Kiely of the Morgan, who co-curated the show with the John F. Kennedy museum's Hemingway Curator Susan Wrynn (December 18th).

The exhibition itself is divided into six chronological sections of objects and images from Hemingway’s life. The first section, “The Class Prophet,” examines the early beginnings of the writer, starting with his first published fiction story in his high school’s magazine, progressing through his job as a reporter at The Kansas City Star, and ending with his entrance into the army. “World War I” looks at Hemingway’s year-long involvement in the Great War as an American Red Cross member in Italy; as the show notes, while “Hemingway’s participation in World War I was brief… its impact on his writing career was profound.” Section three takes Hemingway to “Paris,” on assignment from The Toronto Star, where he developed his poetry and prose (In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises) alongside his fellow expatriates Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach.

The remaining three sections sweep the writer away from Paris in 1929 to “Key West and Havana”—and the mythical Finca Vigia—and through two marriages and a couple novels. This is also the period of Hemingway’s most famous escapades: whether it was hunting down evasive game in Sun Valley, crouching in the plains of the Serengeti, or dodging bullets during the Spanish Civil War, however, the writer never ceased to write. This symbiotic relationship between Hemingway's work and his impetus for adventure led him eventually to the front lines of the fifth section, “World War II”: “I got war fever like the measles,” he explained in one of his dispatches for Collier’s magazine in 1944. “An Old Hunter Talking with Gods” closes out the show with artifacts from the last years of Hemingway's life as he battled through health complaints, depression, and his final novels—one of which, The Old Man and the Sea, secured the writer a Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.

Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars is ambitious and expansive, yet diligently historicized and detailed and each section, photograph, and line of hurried scrawl will remind you, as Colin B. Bailey, the director of the Morgan succinctly puts it, why it, "is impossible to talk about the history of twentieth-century American literature or world literature for that matter without talking about Ernest Hemingway early in the conversation."

Photograph of Hemingway at the Finca Vigia, posing in front of Waldo Peirce’s 1929 oil portrait, Kid Balzac, which depicts Hemingway, 1952. The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Visit Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars at the Morgan Library up until January 31st 2016. Find more information on the exhibition and tickets for the various programs here.

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