Hemingway Survived Two Plane Crashes. A Letter About Them Just Sold for Over $237,000.
The New York Times I am weak from so much internal bleeding, the novelist wrote to his lawyer. Have been a good boy and tried to rest.
A four-page letter that Ernest Hemingway wrote to his lawyer after the writer survived two back-to-back plane crashes in East Africa in 1954 sold at auction for $237,055, according to Nate Sanders Auctions.
Bidding for the letter started at $19,250 and there were 12 total bids before the letter was sold last week, according to the auction house, which is based in Los Angeles and specializes in autographed items. Its unclear who bought the letter.
Hemingway, 55 at the time, had been visiting Congo, Kenya and Rwanda with his fourth wife, the American journalist Mary Welsh Hemingway, on a hunting safari. Over the course of a few days, the couple were involved in two crashes, the second more violent than the first, that would leave their mark on him for the rest of his life.
In the first crash, their plane clipped a telegraph wire and plunged onto the crocodile-infested shores of the Nile, according to PBS. Hemingway wrote about his trip to Africa in Look Magazine in 1954, which included a 16-page spread about his safari to Kenya.
