Hemingway's Basement Archive Preserved and Digitized

About half of the more than two thousand documents that had been moldering for decades in the basement of Ernest Hemingway's home outside Havana, Cuba, have been preserved and digitized and are now available to scholars, Reuters recently reported. Cuba opened the mostly unpublished manuscripts, letters, and other ephemera to researchers as part of a joint effort by the Cuban National Cultural Heritage Council and the U.S. Science Research Council, both of which had been working under a 2002 agreement to preserve the documents. The archive also includes thousands of photographs and books.

The digitized documents are currently available only at Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, Hemingway's home in San Francisco de Paula for twenty-one years. Later this month the archive will also be available at the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston, and Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, the director of Cuba's Museo Ernest Hemingway, told Reuters that the archive will likely be available online someday.

Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, wrote The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream while living at Finca Vigia. In 2007 preservationists discovered notes the author had written on the walls of a bathroom in the house. The notes, which focused on the author's weight and health, were discovered under four layers of paint.