A newly discovered piece of fiction by the US author joins humbling examples of juvenilia by other great artists, from Jane Austen to Pablo Picasso
“We are going on a trip to Europe,” begins what could be Ernest Hemingway’s first piece of fiction. It was discovered in May in Florida – and made public last week– in the archives kept by a family close to the Hemingways. A page in a notebook dated “Sep 8 ‘09” looks like a diary entry by Hemingway, who would have been 10 at the time.
Sandra Spanier, English professor and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, saw the notebook in May, and realised that it wasn’t a travelogue – Hemingway had never made the trip – but was his own creation. At that young age, it bore some of the writer’s hallmarks. “Hemingway later said that his method was to invent from experience and he often placed his characters in absolutely realistically described landscapes,” she noted.
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