Discovery of five Hemingway stories

Press, 7 August 1985, Page 6

Discovery of five Hemingway stories

NZPA-AFP New York Five short stories by a young Ernest Hemingway will be published for the first time this (northern) autumn in a new biography of the American author, the “New York Times” reports. His biographer, Professor Peter Griffin, found the short stories, as well as an unfinished novel and letters from Hemingway, in a pile of boxes given by the author’s fourth wife to the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester. Massachusetts. The short stories, “Crossroads,” “The Mercenaries,” “The Ash-Heel’s Tendon,” “The Current” and “Portrait of the Idealist in Love,” are valuable because they explore Hemingway themes and show the author already writing in the spare style that was to become his trademark, says Professor Griffin. The stories were influenced by the author’s unrequited love for a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who he met in 1918 when recovering from a war injury in a Milan hospital, according to Professor Griffin. The heroine of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” Catherine Barkley, was based on Agnes Kurowsky. Professor Griffin’s biography, “Along With Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years,” will be published in November.