Hemingway, Ernest | Autograph letter signed to to his sister Marcelline, one of Hemingway's earliest letters - photo 1
Hemingway, Ernest | Autograph letter signed to to his sister Marcelline, one of Hemingway's earliest letters - photo 2

Hemingway, Ernest | Autograph letter signed to to his sister Marcelline, one of Hemingway's earliest letters

Lot 15
08.12.2023 12:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 7 000
AuctioneerSotheby´s
Event locationUSA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 1105462
Lot 15 | Hemingway, Ernest | Autograph letter signed to to his sister Marcelline, one of Hemingway's earliest letters
Estimate value
$ 7 000 – 10 000
Hemingway, Ernest
Autograph letter signed ("Lovingly, Ernest"), to his sister Marcelline Hemingway ("Dear Marc") at Nantucket, Massachusetts

One page (202 x 127 mm) on blue-ruled tablet paper, [Oak Park, Illinois], 9 June [1909], docketed in upper right margin "From Ernest Hemingway—1909—Oak Park Ill" and on the verso "Keep this 1st letter of Ernests to me, which is Marcelline" and "Ernie was almost 10 …," accompanied by an autograph letter signed by Dr. Clarence Hemingway ("Your Papa—Clarence") to Marcelline, 4 pages (163 x 132 mm) on a bifolium of his monogrammed stationery, Oak Park, 18 June 1909, and with the original envelope in the hand of Clarence Hemingway with the later docket "Enclosing letter from Ernest age 10—re School—to Marc—June 9, 1909."

One of the earliest known letters from the future giant of modern literature: nine-year-old Ernest Hemingway to his eleven-year-old sister. The ongoing Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway prints only three letters and one postcard with an earlier date of composition, all of which were sent to either his father or mother. The present letter was written when Ernest was at home with his father and two younger sisters in Oak Park, while Marcelline was vacationing with their mother in Nantucket: "Wed June 9. Dear Marc, Our room won in the field day against Miss Koontz room. Al Bersham knocked two of Chandlers teeth out in a scrap and your dear gentle Miss hood had Mr. smith hold him while she lickt him with a raw hide strap. Lovingly, Ernest." As the late Hemingway specialist Bart Auerbach observed, "Already the fourth-grader shows an ability to handle irony and a penchant for writing about violent action." Mary L. Hood was the principal of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary School in Oak Park; Flora Koontz and Warren R. Smith were teachers at the school

Dr. Hemingway's letter to Marcelline provides family news mostly having to do with Sunday School. He reports that seven-year-old Ursula Hemingway "spoke her piece very nicely" at the Children's Day observance—"a combination church and Sunday School service" during which Ernest was allowed to stay home. He closes by wishing God's blessings for Marcelline and his wife, "Gracie darling," and looking forward to the family soon being together at Windemere, the summer cottage he built on the shore of Michigan's Walloon Lake—and which was to play a large role in Hemingway's development as a man and a writer.

Marcelline Hemingway (1898–1963), the recipient of the letters in this and the following lots, was the oldest of the six Hemingway children. Though eighteen months older than Ernest, she was held back from entering grade school so she and her brother could be together in the same grade; they both graduated from high school in June 1917. Although they moved apart later in life—as demonstrated by Hemingway's July 1937 letter (see lot 33)—the two were inseparable throughout their early years. Marcelline wrote about the Hemingway family and growing up with Ernest in her memoir At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait, first published in 1962, a year after her brother’s death. It covers the period up to their father’s suicide in 1928. An expanded edition, which adds the Ernest-Marcelline correspondence, was issued by the University of Idaho Press in 1999. Displaying a nice way with irony herself, Marcelline described the memoir as "the simple story of what life was like in our happy home when we were children and growing up."
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