Letters Show Hemingway as 'Besotted Lover'

Nov. 4, 2009— -- "My Dearest Pickle" is the way Ernest Hemingway, famous tough guy, man's man, literary icon of the 20th century and, apparently, hopeless romantic, addressed letters to his beloved Mary Welsh, who would become his fourth wife.

"I want to serve you well and true the way some very dull people want to serve their country and even sadder people want to serve their God. But sometimes are very happy at it," he wrote to her. "You're a very small god with a face that breaks my heart."

This letter is among thousands of captivating and -- at times -- shocking letters recently released by the Cuban government and donated to the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

The collection spans Hemingway's 20 years in Cuba, when he lived north of Havana in a home named Finca Vigia, and had been largely unavailable to scholars and Hemingway fans, until now.

These papers are the "missing piece of the puzzle" said Sandra Spanier, a professor at Penn State University and editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. "No biographer had access to Cuba. And yet it was so important to Hemingway ... he loved Cuba. He gave his Nobel Prize to the Cuban people. And over there the Cuban people claim him as their own."

Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 and author of classics like "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls," remains beloved the world over almost 50 years after this death.