Beschreibung:

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. Autograph letter signed ("Ernest" in pencil) to Richard Armstrong head of the International News Service in Havana; Key West, 25 July 1936. One page, 4to, single-spaced, place, date and 13-word closing in Hemingway's autograph in pencil, on inexpensive tan paper, a few marginal tears, with typed envelope. WORKING ON "TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT" "... I have something I need for this damed book [ To Have and Have Not ] I'm working on that don't know whether you can get or not. What [I] want is contemporary newspaper (eye witness accounts) that I can re-write or steal from what facts I want of these events [Hemingway then lists several] ... I suppose some of those times, most probably, there were no papers in Havana. Could you get them from files of U.S. papers in that event? I know this is a hell of a job but if you can get them for me will give you any amount of Mss. first editions items etc. ... Have postponed the book of stories because I want to use the 'One Trip Across,' '[The] Tradesman's Return,' and three others that have to do with the same people plus the one I was telling you about Cuba and need this stuff in between sort of like the chapters in between the stories in In Our Time. What I need is this stuff I'm writing you for as source material to make up out of. Can you write me the original of the story you told me about the shooting of the father and sons. I want to contrast the events in K.W. [Key West] and Havana and carry a thing through both of them. This is maybe too much a hell of a job and if so tell me so. But if you can do it will try to make payment in items..." Not in Letters, ed. C. Baker, and presumably unpublished. [With:] Carbon copies of two long typed letters from Armstrong to Hemingway, Havana, 27 August and 12 September 1936. Together, 13 pages, 4to, supplying the detailed Cuban political background material requested--much of which Hemingway used in To Have and Have Not. (3)