Note: This post is part of The Hemingway Collection, an archive of essays, images, and hyperlinks to interesting articles about the great American author.
Talk about a literary adventure! A note from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an unknown stranger is found inscribed in a book. Almost a hundred years later, the wife of a professor — who was a friend of Fitzgerald’s daughter — notices that the last page of the book has been removed, and uses the ol’ lightly-rub-a-pencil detective trick to reveal another note.
The message which had been scribbled on the last page was written by Hemingway! It’s the note he describes leaving about Fitzgerald missing a train in A Moveable Feast!
So that means the inscription Fitzgerald wrote in the front of the book — Portraits: Real and Imaginary, by Ernest Boyd — was almost certainly to Hemingway.
