Yesterday I posted about the copies of 3,000+ previously unseen documents from Hemingway’s estate that are now at the JFK Library. I emailed the library, and they sent me their press release, which doesn’t appear to be online. The crux is this:

Examples of the type of documents that will be available to researchers in Boston include:

Letters to Hemingway from his family including his mother Grace Hall and his sons John and Patrick;
Over a dozen letters from Adriana Ivanich, the possible muse for his novel Across the River and Into the Trees.  Adriana also designed the dust jackets for Across the River and Into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea;
A group of letters to Mary Welsh Hemingway [his fourth wife] written when they first met and were both serving as war correspondents in Europe during World War II;
Letters or cables from such luminaries as Robert Capa, Pablo Casals, Marlene Dietrich, Sinclair Lewis, Lillian Ross and Ingrid Bergman;
Mail from friends and fans particularly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published Old Man and the Sea.

The press release also clears up the question of whether the screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea is an unused one written by Hemingway. Nope. Oh well, there’s still that alternate ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Here’s the full press release:

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From the Washington Post:

Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too.

The fact that so little is known about Martha and that she has been cast throughout American history as First Frump is, in part, her fault. In the days after George Washington died, she, as was the custom of well-known people of her time, burned all their correspondence. So we know George wrote two youthful love letters bursting with yearning and passion to Sally Fairfax, even though she was the wife of his good friend. We have a really bad poem he wrote as a teen to a young Virginia beauty (”Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun . . . “). We have no idea what he wrote to Martha.

Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is “an experimental non-commercial project to archive and re-publish public domain works.”

Let’s say you’re going through the more than half-a-million public-domain books available as PDFs at Google Books and the Internet Archive, and - being from the old school - you think how great it would be to have a certain rare old book in actual book form: a printed, bound, softcover object you can hold. This service lets you do that. They say the price ranges from $5 to $19.

[ADDED:] Almost 4 million different titles can be printed this way.

{via Open Access News}

The National Post has some ideas about who should play the principal figures in the newly announced biopic of Hemingway.

1. Ernest Hemingway. You need some serious chops to take on the late Hemingway. Full of rage, vulnerability, a man at the end of his rope, and still tugging against it. We need an actor with a few tricks to play. Someone like James Gandolfini. But wait! Check out Gandolfini’s IMDB page, and you’ll see that he has signed on for an “untitled Ernest Hemingway Project” due to arrive in 2011. The plot of this one centres  “on the romance between Ernest Hemingway and WWII correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s inspiration for For Whom the Bell Tolls and the only woman who ever asked for a divorce from the writer.” Could this film be one in the same? If not, and Gandolfini is tied up, I’d suggest Robert Downey Jr (aged, of course - but they can do that now!). Or how about William Hurt - he’s got that inner rage thing down pretty good.

At Daily Kos, Gary Smith writes about his unexpected run-in with one of my favorite writers (and his), the somewhat cantankerous Harlan Ellison. While working on his not-yet-public (or so he thought) website, Smith had posted some text from Ellison’s heart-rending story Jeffty Is Five as a placeholder.

So last night (this morning, actually) at 1:30 am, I received a phone call.  Being in the depths of slumber at the time, I’m afraid that I answered the call with more of a sleep-choked grunt than actual words.

“Is this Gary Smith?” came the voice from the phone.

“Urrmmhh … why?  Who’s this?” I replied (quite wittily, I think, for someone less than 5 seconds after awakening).

“This is Harlan Ellison.”

This gets me thinking about my unexpected call from Ellison. It was New Year’s Eve eve (December 30), 2005, but at a much saner time - about 10 PM. After answering the phone, the first thing I hear is, “Whaddya mean I’m uneven?!” I’m trying to figure out who this is yelling at me. (But even at that point, I could tell it was mock-anger, someone acting mad with tongue in cheek.)

I forget my reply, but eventually he told me who he was. I had reviewed several of his books - in fact, had given him a whole section in the fiction chapter - in my first book, Outposts. I gave praise but did say something about an uneven oeuvre. (To be fair, most top-notch writers - or any kind of artist - put out material of widely varying quality, especially the ones who produce prolifically for decades, like Ellison.)

It turns out he was actually extremely grateful for the attention, since I had directed a bunch of new, young readers his way. He said something along the lines of every writer dreading that he’ll be forgotten.

He even offered to send me an autographed copy of any of his books that he had on hand. Naturally, I said no, I can’t accept a gift in exchange for reviews. Hee hee. In reality, I said hell yeah, I’d love to get a personally signed book from one of my favorite writers. I never did get it, but much later I found out that Ellison had a pretty good excuse.

When we talked, if I remember correctly, he was going to be leaving in a few days for a big adventure in the Australian Outback. Soon after that, he had a major heart attack and damn near took a ride in time’s winged chariot.