The Old Man and the Sea Summary and Analysis

The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library

The JFK Library and Museum in Boston, MA features the Ernest Hemingway Collection. Though President Kennedy and Hemingway never met, when Hemingway died in 1961, Kennedy released a statement that said, "Few Americans have had a greater impact on the emotions and attitudes of the American people than Ernest Hemingway.... He almost single-handedly transformed the literature and the ways of thought of men and women in every country in the world."

Kennedy made arrangements with Ernest's widow, Mary, to claim her husband's literary and personal estate from his Cuban home, the Finca Vigia. In 1964, Mary Hemingway offered her husband's collection to the JFK Library and Museum, which was in the planning stages. The depositing of his papers in the library's archives began in 1972.

Highlights of the collection include more than 1000 manuscript items, ranging from one-line fragments to thousand-page manuscripts; more than 10,000 photographs; family scrapbooks; several thousand letters written by or to Hemingway; books from Hemingway's private library, many with the writer's handwritten notes in the margins.