“An invaluable book for anyone interested in Hemingway or the development of a major creative mind.” — Scott Turow, author of Identical and Presumed Innocent

Hemingway in a field, undated, but likely circa 1918.

Hemingway, on the right and age 2, was raised as the "twin" to his older sister Marcelline. Their mother captioned this 1901 photo: "Two summer girls with their peonies."

Hemingway's teen journal includes drawings and accounting from his newspaper route.

In the 1930s, Hemingway visited his dentist in Paris. He must have been in considerable pain, as the X-ray shows an abscess on his lower left first molar underneath a deep silver filling.

Movie card for the 1947 Hemingway adaptation, "The Macomber Affair."

Agnes von Kurowsky's break-up letter with a young Hemingway. A nurse during WWI, she was the inspiration for Catherine Berkley in "A Farewell to Arms."

The author was a life-long art lover. Here: Hemingway's membership card to New York's Modern Museum of Art.

Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park is part time capsule, part biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author. This hardcover coffee table book features never-before-seen items such as family photos, teenage diaries, bullfighting tickets, love letters — even a dental x-ray. Hidden Hemingway is a chance for a new generation to discover a literary genius and for fans to see him as more than just the larger-than-life myth he created for himself.

Hidden Hemingway also includes one of the final letters Hemingway wrote, as he was undergoing electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic. These documents, photographs, and ephemera trace the trajectory of the life of an American literary legend.

The items showcased in Hidden Hemingway are more than stage dressing for a literary life, more than marginalia. They provide definition—and, in some cases, documentation—of Hemingway’s ambition, heartbreak, literary triumphs and trials, and joys and tragedies. Hemingway’s stature as an author draws readers, biographers and historians to his work. The wealth of material he left behind makes him such a compelling, engaging, and often polarizing figure.

For Hemingway, the material he saved was both autobiography and research. He gathered data and details that made the life lived in his books more authentic. The authors of Hidden Hemingway have strived to do the same, telling a life story through items that illuminate Hemingway’s life and legacy.

Praise for Hidden Hemingway:

“Ernest Hemingway was the genuine literary giant of my youth: we groundlings studied him closely, we imitated and then we parodied him, we admired the fine figure he cut and envied his celebrity, and now fifty years later, it’s a privilege to look through his closet and read his stuff and discover him as a mortal man.”
— Garrison Keillor, author of Lake Wobegon and A Visit to Mark Twain’s House 

“Hidden Hemingway offers remarkable insights into the complex and frequently-tortured inner life of one of the 20th Century American authors most likely to survive the test of time. An invaluable book for anyone interested in Hemingway or the development of a major creative mind.”
— Scott Turow, author of Identical and Presumed Innocent

“A fascinating book about the most fascinating writer in American history. Hemingway’s life unfolds from these pages in brilliant detail and endless surprise.”
— Jonathan Eig, author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster

“What an absolute delight to have the treasures of the Oak Park Hemingway archives collected between two covers: little-known and previously unpublished photographs, family memorabilia, historic images of Oak Park, newspaper clippings, love letters, boyhood notebooks, Hemingway’s earliest fiction, and much, much more. A gem for scholars and fans alike!”
— Carl P. Eby, co-editor of Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World

“These manuscripts, photographs, and objects drawn from Hemingway’s personal papers might have the aura of a reliquary if they did not also and so uncannily convey a kind of longing known to those of us who spend our lives in the archives. Here not Hemingway, and not the authors of the present volume, but the archive itself must be credited as memoirist—a memoirist, moreover, who wakes us up to the souls of artifacts. The painstaking research involved in the documentation of these pieces never threatens to disturb their mysterious silence or their infinite summons.”
— Marta Werner, editor of The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems