Draft Of Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize Speech Discovered At The NYPL

Jen Carlson/Gothamist

In the back of a book called Thirty Years by John P. Marquand, Ernest Hemingway penned (or, more accurately, penciled) the draft of the speech he would deliver upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. The book is now one of the many treasures in the Rare Book Division of The New York Public Library, and when we dropped by recently rare books curator Michael Inman took it out for us. Inman noted that when he first found it he wasn't sure what was so special about the Marquand book until he looked in the back. It's there that Hemingway wrote a draft of his speech, which shows a different, much more brutally Hemingway ending: "It was very hard to get what I wanted to say without being ungrateful or rude."

The draft is written on the back pages of this book. (Jen Carlson/Gothamist)

Of course, he didn't end up finishing his speech like that, instead he went with: "I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you." (You can listen to it in full below.) At the time, the NY Times reported that his win was "For his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evinced in The Old Man and the Sea."

Note: Hemingway didn't actually attend the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm that year, where the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden read his speech, but he did read and record his speech at a later date.