Century-Old Hemingway Love Letters Uncovered

OAK PARK, IL — Ernest Hemingway has an undeniable reputation as a larger-than-life figure who sailed the Caribbean, adventured around the world and seduced countless women. New love letters have been made public that suggest Hemingway’s life might have turned out differently if he had married his high school sweetheart and possible first love.

The Hemingway love letters, uncovered in Marblehead, Massachusetts, date back to 1918 and were written to Frances Elizabeth Coates, an Oak Park classmate and opera singer Hemingway became smitten with during his time at Oak Park High School and kept pursuing during his time serving in World War I. Coates’ granddaughter, Betty Fermano, has carefully preserved these letters since her grandmother’s death in 1988, making them some of the best-preserved letters written by Hemingway’s hand more than a century ago, WBUR reported.

“To find letters like that — that’s extremely rare. It’s a fresh view of him,” Pennsylvania State University English professor Sandra Spanier told Hemingway biographer Robert K. Elder in The Paris Review. One letter begins, "Dear Frances, you see, I can’t break the old habit of writing you whenever I get a million miles away from Oak Park...” and continues with Hemingway bragging about the “very good-looking girls” in Milan. This bit, Elder asserts, was likely added in the hopes of making Coates a little jealous.

According to The Paris Review, Coates and Hemingway casually dated briefly but it was mostly one-sided, with Coates moving on to marry another classmate, John Grace. Fortunately, she held onto the Hemingway love letters, along with a framed high school photograph of the author that she kept in a drawer, WBUR reported.

Coates continued to haunt Hemingway years later. The character of Liz Coates is an object of pursuit in the 1923 short story “Up in Michigan.” Nearly two decades after their correspondence, Coates may have also inspired Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not, Elder says in The Paris Review. In it, he addresses a woman named Frances, writing, “The fiancé is a Skull and Bones man, voted most likely to succeed, voted most popular, who still thinks more of others than of himself and would be too good for anyone except a lovely girl like Frances.” This may likely be a reference to Frances Coates and her husband, John, who was more popular than Hemingway in their youth.

The love letters illuminate a humanness in Hemingway far removed from his gigantic persona. Coates reflected on Hemingway’s meek nature in a passage shared in The Paris Review, calling him, “a great, awkward boy falling over his long feet.” She mentions his pale skin, prone to blushing, and adds, “What a help, his beard, later was to be, protecting and covering this sensitivity.” After the discovery of these love letters, the image of that “sensitivity” in the face of Hemingway’s iconic beard take on a much more resonant image.

Elder was one of the founding regional editors of the Illinois Patch network in 2010.

Image credit: By EH2723PMilan1918.jpg: Portrait by Ermeni Studios derivative work: Beao and Fallschirmjäger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons