What Hemingway Left in Sloppy Joe’s Bar 80 Years Ago
The trove of items deposited in Key West, now part of a new archive at Penn State, includes four unpublished short stories, drafts of manuscripts and boxes of personal effects.
Ernest Hemingway served as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Credit... The Toby and Betty Bruce collection of Ernest Hemingway in the Penn State Special Collections Library
In an untitled, three-page short story, Ernest Hemingway casts F. Scott Fitzgerald as a scrappy boxer who leaves the ring battered and disfigured but ultimately victorious.
He sketches out a novel he’ll never write, “A New Slain Knight,” calling it a “picaresque novel for America” that will follow his protagonist through a prison escape, a bank robbery and noirish double-crosses.
Wearing his American Red Cross uniform and smiling at the camera, an 18-year-old Hemingway huddles in a trench with Italian soldiers during World War I, just days before he was wounded by a mortar shell and machine-gun fire, an experience that inspired him to write “A Farewell to Arms.”
