Hemingway’s papers come to JFK Library

Despite the strained relations between the countries, the curators of the Kennedy library and the Castro regime have over the years found common ground, enough that the library announced this week that Cuba has shared copies of 3,000 letters and documents from the Hemingway archives at the country’s Ministry of Culture. The material fills a hole in the library’s collection, which purports to have the most comprehensive body of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s writings.

The documents include an alternate ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as correspondence with the likes of Robert Capa, Sinclair Lewis and Ingrid Bergman.

10.30.2009Tagged with:    

Living on $500,000 a Year

A study of the tax returns of F. Scott Fitzgerald provides a snapshot of his lifestyle in the first half of the 20th century.

Over Fitzgerald’s working life, he reported a total of $449,713 in gross income, and he paid $24,666 in taxes—thus the effective tax rate of 5.5 percent. Most of his earnings came from the short stories and, later, the movies. His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Today Gatsby is read in nearly every high school and college and regularly produces $500,000 a year in Scottie’s trust for her children.

(via kottke)

10.29.2009Tagged with: