For Hemingway’s Birthday, A Gift to the World
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY / AP (The birth certificate and family photograph of Ernest Hemingway from a scrapbook created by his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway.)
Long before “scrapbooking” was a verb, mothers were collecting memories about their children and their achievements in volumes for posterity. Fortunately for both fans and scholars of Ernest Hemingway, his mother, Grace, was one of these women who kept meticulous journals of her now-famous (and infamous) son.
This week, in honor of what would have been the iconic American author’s 114th birthday, July 21, 1899, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston has made available to the public the digitized journals. There are a total of five volumes and all can now be viewed online here.
For scholars, this is particularly exciting news as the majority of the collection has never been available and only a few fortunate researchers have seen it at all. Prior to their digitization, the leather books were kept in a dark vault to prevent them from crumbling and otherwise becoming damaged.
