62 Years After It Was Written, a Hemingway Story Gets Published for the First Time

Ernest Hemingway's catalog of published works inspired by his time living in Paris just got a little larger. As PBS reports, his semi-autobiographical short story, "A Room on the Garden Side," has appeared in print for the first time.

Unlike other works that are published long after an author's death, this story was never lost. It was part of a quintet of pieces Hemingway wrote in 1956 and submitted to publisher Charlie Scribner that same year. Only one story in the batch was published, while "A Room on the Garden Side" ended up preserved at the Library of Congress and at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

The 3000 words of prose, written by hand on 15 sheets of paper, draw from Hemingway's time in Paris during World War II, in which he served as a reporter and unofficial soldier. The story takes place after the liberation of Paris and centers on a group of French resistance fighters drinking at The Ritz and reminiscing on their war days.

Plenty of parallels can be drawn between the narrator Robert, or "Papa," and Ernest Hemingway. In real life, Hemingway helped take back the The Ritz, one of his favorite spots in the city, during Paris's liberation from Nazi occupation.

Hemingway died in 1961, and in the decades since, his estate has been protective of his unpublished works. Now, 62 years after "A Room on the Garden Side" was penned, his estate has finally agreed to have it published in The Strand, a quarterly literary magazine. The Strand's managing editor Andrew Gulli told PBS that members of Hemingway's estate "understand we have a good track record of publishing unpublished works. They want to make sure that if something is released that it will honor the memory of Ernest Hemingway.”

Issue 55 of The Strand, featuring Hemingway's story, is now available to purchase for $10.

[h/t PBS]