Just up yesterday is the news that the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston is putting on display a short 1946 letter from J.D. Salinger to Ernest Hemingway. You can read the entire blog post from The New York Times below. Not every fan letter written to Ernest Hemingway merits its own display in a museum, but when its author is J. D. Salinger a little pomp and circumstance is understandable. On Sunday, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston will put on display a note from Salinger to Hemingway, written in 1946, that recounts a meeting between the authors and possibly hints at the coming publication of “The Catcher in the Rye,” The Associated Press reported.
In the letter (which can be seen here in its entirety), a young Salinger writes to “Dear Poppa” that he is in a hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, and says “the talks I had with you here were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business.” There are flashes of Salinger’s sardonic wit throughout: He asks Hemingway how his latest novel is coming along and warns him not to option it to Hollywood. (“You’re a rich guy,” he writes. “As Chairman of your many fan clubs, I know I speak for all the members when I say Down with Gary Cooper.”) Salinger also writes that he has “a very sensitive novel in mind, and I won’t have the author called a jerk in 1950.” (“I am a jerk,” he continues, “but the wrong people musn’t know it.”) Thomas Putnam, the director of library, told The A.P. there was no indication whether Hemingway ever wrote back.
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