Ernest Hemingway shows soft side in newly public letters at the Kennedy presidential library

Art Daily News

A portion of an Aug. 6, 1953, letter handwritten by Ernest Hemingway to his Italian friend Gianfranco Ivancich. AP Photo/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. By: Bridget Murphy, Associated Press BOSTON (AP).- Ernest Hemingway shows a tenderness that wasn't part of his usual macho persona in a dozen unpublished letters that became publicly available Wednesday in a collection of the author's papers at the Kennedy presidential library. In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich written in Cuba and dated February 1953, Hemingway wrote of euthanizing his cat "Uncle Willie" after it was hit by a car. "Certainly missed you. Miss Uncle Willie. Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years," the author wrote. "Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs." The letters span from 1953 to 1960, a year before the prize-winning writer's suicide. Whether typed or written in his curly script, some of the dispatches ... More

This black and white photo from the mid-1900's, released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Wednesday, March 28, 2012, shows Ernest Hemingway, second from right, and Gianfranco Ivancich, right, dining with an unidentified woman, left, wife Mary Hemingway, second from left, and Juan "Sinsky" Dunabeitia, center at Hemingway's villa Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. The museum made public on Wednesday a dozen previously unpublished letters Hemingway wrote to Ivancich. Experts say the letters demonstrate tenderness in Hemingway’s character that wasn’t necessarily part of his public persona. (AP Photo/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.