Ernest Hemingway's Letter to Norman Mailer, 12 August 1959
The only known letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to Mailer (12 August 1959); discovered by J. Michael Lennon in 2009 and first published in The Mailer Review in 2010, with Lennon's framing essay.
The only known letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to Mailer, dated 12 August 1959. It was discovered by Mailer’s authorized biographer J. Michael Lennon in July 2009, while he was researching Mailer’s correspondence from the 1950s, and was first published in The Mailer Review‘s 2010 Mailer–Hemingway special issue, paired with Lennon’s framing essay “Hemingway to Mailer—A Delayed Response to The Deer Park.” The holograph is held at the Harry Ransom Center, which supplied the manuscript images; the letter was printed by permission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
The letter is Hemingway’s belated reply to Mailer’s overtures of the 1950s — Mailer had sent him The Deer Park (1955) with an inscription, and had written admiringly of him in Advertisements for Myself — and it is the single direct trace of contact between the two writers whose rivalry and affiliation Mailer pursued, largely one-sidedly, across his career. As such it is among the most significant primary documents the Review has brought to light. The festschrift planning for the journal’s sixteenth volume singles out Lennon’s accompanying essay as the critical frame for “arguably the Review’s single most remarkable primary document.”
The text is not reproduced here (it remains under the Hemingway Foundation’s permission, granted for the Review’s edition); this page records the document and its provenance.